The Undercover ElePHPant: Recent Episodes

Benjamin Eberlei, Matthew Setter

The Undercover ElePHPant is a podcast about scaling and optimizing your PHP applications. Each week, Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter sit down with an expert from the PHP community to discuss a specific aspect of highly performant PHP applications.

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We should be back with a new season of the podcast after the Summer but will let you know, exactly, when that will be when we have a firm date set.

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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Samuel shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including:

  • The common challenges with background processes and PHP?
  • Why background processes & workers can be an important aspect of PHP applications?
  • What angel processes are
  • How to handle failed background processes
  • How to handle memory in PHP with long-running processes
  • Plus loads load more!

Links

  • Tideways Blog: Five Challenges Running Reliable Background Jobs in PHP
  • Solid (by Sir Tim Berners-Lee)
  • The Symfony Messenger Component
  • Episode 4: Retries and Timeouts with Bastian Hofmann
  • RabbitMQ
  • Beanstalkd
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  • Apache Kafka
  • Birdie

Guests: Samuel Roze

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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Arne shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including:

  • What PHP-FPM is
  • What differentiates PHP-FPM from Apache/mod_php?
  • NGINX's different pool types (dynamic, static, and ondemand)
  • How to configure PHP-FPM for high-performance and throughput
  • Using multiple PHP-FPM pools in the same application?
  • Plus loads more!

Links

  • Slides: Optimizing PHP-FPM for Production (PDF)
  • Tideways blog: An Introduction to PHP-FPM Tuning
  • PHP-FPM
  • Configuring PHP-FPM in PHP
  • Thread Pools in NGINX Boost Performance 9x
  • Apache2 and php fpm performance optimization — Step-by-step guide
  • thePHP.cc

Guests: Arne Blankerts

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Jordi Boggiano about logging in production applications as well as logging best practices. We also talk about logging formats, filtering log messages, Monolog and loads more! Jordi shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including:

  • How to get started with logging
  • How to integrate logging into an existing application
  • Options for parsing log files once they're available
  • How many log lines to use per request
  • How to create meaningful log records
  • Jordi's logging best practices
  • Some privacy points to be aware of in the context of the GDPR, CalOPPA, HIPPA, etc.
  • Plus loads load more!

Links

  • Tideways Blog: Four Logging Best Practices for Production Applications
  • Global Privacy Laws Explained
  • Private Packagist
  • Composer
  • Treeware License

Guests: Jordi Boggiano

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Matthieu Napoli about Shared-nothing and Shared Everything Architectures. We also talk about Bref, Swoole, ReactPHP and loads more! Matthieu shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including:

  • What Shared-nothing and Shared Everything architectures are
  • The advantages and disadvantages of both architecture types
  • Why PHP is the language which is most suited to Serverless and FaaS (Function as a Service)
  • A little of the right mindset for developing Serverless code in PHP
  • Some of the challenges ahead for PHP
  • Where PHP could go in the future with respect to Shared-Nothing architecture
  • Plus loads load more!

Links

  • Bref (Build Serverless PHP Applications)
  • Serverless PHP News
  • Serverless PHP applications with Bref (YouTube)
  • FaaS (Function as a Service)
  • Swoole
  • Roadrunner
  • ReactPHP

Guests: Matthieu Napoli.

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Nils Adermann about integrating with third-party APIs in PHP. Nils shares some excellent advice, including:

  • Handling retries and timeouts
  • Efficiently and effectively working with multiple API vendors
  • How to work with vendors when their actions break your apps
  • Different types of responses (the good and the bad)
  • Writing tests
  • Using incremental backoffs
  • Working with rolling rate windows
  • Plus loads load more — including some vendor horror stories!

Links

  • Private Packagist
  • Composer
  • Satis
  • Reliable Integration with Third-Party APIs in PHP

Guests: Nils Adermann.

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Bastian Hofmann about handling retries and timeouts in PHP. Bastian shares a load of great advice, including:

  • Having dedicated hosts for certain traffic
  • Distinguishing between normal users and admin users
  • Offloading work to asynchronous jobs
  • Default socket timeouts and max execution times
  • Automatic retries
  • Tuning settings and rules of thumbs as to how to do so
  • Tooling for monitoring
  • Circuit breakers
  • Integrating monitoring into legacy codebases
  • Plus loads load more!

Links

  • SysEleven GmbH
  • DataDog
  • NewRelic
  • statsd
  • Istio
  • linkerd
  • Kubernetes

Guests: Bastian Hofmann.

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Robert Douglass and Larry Garfield from Platform.sh about running PHP applications on multiple servers. Robert and Larry share a load of excellent advice, including:

  • Why you need to use Load Balancers (along with what they are and some of the key options)

  • How PHP is exceptionally well suited to being deployed across multiple servers out of the box

  • How you can start deploying your PHP apps on multiple servers today

  • How to properly share files, data, cache, and sessions

  • Why sticky sessions are, often, a bad idea

  • How to handle workers and Cron jobs

  • Plus loads load more!

Links

  • Platform.sh
  • GlusterFS
  • Load Balancing
  • Four Key Considerations for Running PHP on Multiple Servers

Guests: Robert Douglass and Larry Garfield.

Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Marco Pivetta (ocramius) about:

  • PHP 7.4's new preloading feature: what it is, how it works, the benefits and drawbacks of using it
  • The speed differences between different versions of PHP (especially in 7.x)
  • The difference between OPcache and Preloading
  • How Composer's autoloader may soon be a thing of the past

Notable Quotes

Composer is the mother of all frameworks.The (Composer) autoloader will gradually disappear.You wouldn't build a house and not check it for 10 years. It should be the same for software projects.Everything (in software development) is a trade-off.Links

  • https://tideways.com/profiler/blog/5-ways-to-increase-php-performance
  • https://wiki.php.net/rfc/preload
  • Roave/you-are-using-it-wrong
  • Roave/BackwardCompatibilityCheck

Guests: Marco Pivetta.
Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei, and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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Thanks to PHP being an interpreted language and it that it has a garbage collector, PHP developers don't often have to think about memory management. Unlike developers in compiled languages, such as C/C++, we don't have to give that much thought to memory allocation and deallocation.

However, it's helpful to have a broad understanding of how garbage collection works in PHP, along with how you can interact with it so that you can create high performing applications.

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Derick Rethans about:

  • The basics of how garbage collection works in PHP
  • About how Xdebug and garbage collection in PHP came about
  • About some of the functions available for interacting with it
  • How to get the most out of garbage collection

Links

  • https://tideways.com/profiler/blog/what-is-garbage-collection-in-php-and-how-do-you-make-the-most-of-it
  • https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0aa0/bbefc44d55a18826a0d82007f4b1f678cb36.pdf
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823054
  • https://xdebug.org/support
  • https://derickrethans.nl/xdebug-update-september-2019.html

Guests: Derick Rethans.
Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei, and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email podcast@tideways.com.

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

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Welcome to the introductory episode of The Undercover ElePHPant.
This is the welcome episode, where we give you the rundown on what the podcast is about, who we, your lovely podcast hosts, are and what you can expect to hear.

So, let's get started.
This podcast aims to do three, core, things:

  1. Uncover details and secrets of scaling PHP and how to maximise its performance.
  2. Discuss different strategies to deploy PHP applications and scripts in production.
  3. Provide helpful tips and tricks to keeping a PHP app running smoothly.

Now, for a little bit about us, your hosts.

Benjamin: I am Benjamin, I contributed to Doctrine and Symfony over the years and have started contributing to PHP and specifically the DOM extension. I am also deeply interested in everything related to PHP performance, scaling, and operations, which is why I founded Tideways - a software for monitoring, profiling and exception tracking PHP applications. This is also why i wanted to start this podcast with Matthew.

Matthew: I'm an independent software engineer and systems administrator, with a passion for performance and security. I've been developing web-based software and administering Linux servers since around 1999.

Benjamin: In season one, we'll have ten episodes, covering, ten different topics with guests who are extremely knowledgeable on each subject. We're planning to talk about garbage collection, profiling, background processes, shared-nothing architecture, timeouts, limits, and retries — and a lot more.

That’s a pretty broad range of topics, so we’re confident there'll be something for you, no matter your skill level or what you’re working on at the moment.

Matthew: We're planning to launch at the end of October, but we don't have a firm launch date as yet. However, if you subscribe to the podcast at undercover-elephpant.com, and follow us on Twitter, we’re @Undercover_PHP(https://undercover-elephpant.com), you'll know when the first episode's about to drop.

If you're interested in all these topics, in increasing the performance of your PHP applications, then join us from the end of October, for The Undercover ElePHPant.