My site is slow, what can I do? - Profiling PHP applications

It's nothing new that speed is important for the success of any web application. Only a few hundred milliseconds may lie between a user leaving your site or staying. Unfortunately performance problems are oftentimes hard to fix and even harder to pinpoint.
In this talk I will show you how we at ResearchGate measure web application performance, which means not only timing how long the PHP backend took to deliver a page, but also tracking the speed the users actually perceives in the browser. After that you will see how you can track down and analyze any problems you found through measuring with the help of tools like Xdebug, XHProf, the Qafoo Profiler and the Symfony Debug Toolbar. And if you still need to get faster after optimizing and fixing all these issues, I'll introduce you to some tricks, techniques and patterns to even further decrease load times.

Transcript

1. My site is slow, what can I do? Profiling PHP @BastianHofmann
2. This talk is all about...
4. Speed of your web application
5. We'll talk about...
6. Why it matters
7. How to measure it
8. How to find out where the problems are
9. Before we start
10. A few words about me
13. Questions? Ask
14. http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann
18. Why should you care?
19. It is really important
22. Every ms counts
26. So what is pagespeed?
27. Server
28. Your PHP application Request Response
29. Your PHP application Request Response Load balancer
30. Your PHP application Request Response Load balancer
31. web server db http service http service cache user request
32. But there is more
37. http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/
38. So what happens on your server is really important
39. But the rest is as well
40. Step 1
41. Measuring
49. So you need to measure at your users side
50. Navigation Timing API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/ Navigation_timing
52. Resource Timing API http://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/
54. For older browsers you have to do it yourself
55. https://github.com/lognormal/boomerang
57. Getting it back to the server
58. Tracking request
59. https://tracking.example.com/? page=profile&backend=123&co mplete=890&domReady=580
60. logstash http://logstash.net/
61. input filter output
62. Very rich plugin system
63. browser JS: boomerang logstash trackingServer access log requests tracking image with timing information as query parameters
64. Graphing it
65. Graphite http://graphite.wikidot.com/
67. browser JS: boomerang logstash trackingServer access log requests tracking image with timing information as query parameters graphite statsd
68. input {
 file {
 type => "pagespeed-access"
 path => [ "/var/log/nginx/ access_log/monitoring-access.log" ]
 }
 }
69. filter{
 grok {
 type => "pagespeed-access"
 pattern => "^.*\s\"[A-Z]+\s[^\?\s]+ \?page=%{DATA:page}\&connectTime=% {NUMBER:connectTime}...)?\sHTTP\/\d\.\d\".* $"
 }
 grok {
 type => "pagespeed-access"
 match => ["page", "^(profile| home|...)\.logged(In|Out)$"]
 exclude_tags => ["_grokparsefailure"]
 }
 }
70. output { statsd { type => "pagespeed-access" exclude_tags => ["_grokparsefailure"] host => "localhost" port => 8126 namespace => "pagespeed" sender => "" timing => [ "%{page}.connect", "% {connectTime}", ... ] } }
72. Can we measure more?
73. Load balancer
74. input {
 file {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 path => [ "/var/log/ haproxy-http.log*" ]
 }
 }
75. filter {
 grok {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 pattern => "%{HAPROXYHTTP}" 
 }
 mutate {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 gsub => [
 "server_name", "\.", "_",
 "client_ip", "\.", "_"
 ]
 }
 }
76. output {
 statsd {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 exclude_tags => ["_grokparsefailure"]
 host => "localhost"
 port => 8125
 namespace => "lb"
 sender => ""
 increment => [
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.hits",
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.responses.%{http_status_code}"
 ]
 timing => [
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.time_request", "%{time_request}",
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.time_backend_connect", "%{time_backend_connect}",
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.time_backend_response", "%{time_backend_response}",
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.time_queue", "%{time_queue}",
 "haproxy.%{backend_name}.%{server_name}.% {client_ip}.time_duration", "%{time_duration}"
 ]
 }

77. browser JS: boomerang logstash trackingServer access log requests tracking image with timing information as query parameters graphite statsd logstash load balancer access log logstash service access log
78. From within your PHP app
79. From your JS frontend
80. Slow query logs
81. More fine grained metrics
82. By pages
83. By browser
84. By country
85. Logged in / out
86. Heavy users
87. Define goals
88. Anomaly detection
89. http://codeascraft.com/2013/06/11/introducing-kale/
90. Step 2
91. How to find out where the problems are
92. Profiling
94. xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 1 http://url?XDEBUG_PROFILE
95. Webgrind https://github.com/jokkedk/webgrind
97. Use it locally on your dev machine
98. XHProf https://github.com/facebook/xhprof
99. Use it in production for a subset of requests
100. XHGUI https://github.com/perftools/xhgui
105. php-meminfo https://github.com/BitOne/php-meminfo
106. Blackfire https://blackfire.io/
107. Tideways https://tidyways.io/
110. New Relic http://newrelic.com/
112. Symfony Debug Toolbar
115. Extend it http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/profiler/ data_collector.html
122. Aggregate it
124. Step 3
125. Fix it
126. That's something you have to do
128. Some hints on better performance
129. GZIP
130. CDNs
131. DNS provider
132. Test them
133. DB Indexes
134. Minify JS https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
135. Minify CSS http://sass-lang.com/
136. Concatenate JS/ CSS/...
137. Correct caching headers
138. Opcache
139. Data Caching
140. APCU
141. memcached
142. PHP 5.6 https://blog.asmallorange.com/2013/08/php-roadmap- performance/
143. Are you using your libraries correctly?
144. Symfony
145. Doctrine
146. DI container
147. SPDY/HTTP 2.0
148. Minimize redirects
149. Check image compression https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-imagemin
150. Compress HTML
151. Check YSlow, Pagespeed
152. DNS prefetch
153. <link  rel="dns-­‐prefetch"     href="//host_name_to_prefetch.com">
154. <link  rel="preload"     href="//host_name_to_prefetch.com">
155. Move logic to async workers
156. Precompute expensive stuff
157. Varnish
158. ESI
159. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu Institution
160. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu <esi:include src="..." /> Institution
161. Load content asynchronously
162. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu Institution
163. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu <div id="placeholder"></div> <script>loadWidget('/aboutMe', function(w) { w.render({ replace : '#placeholder' }); })</script> Institution
164. Flush content early
165. Move logic to shutdown handlers
166. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown- function.php
167. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fastcgi-finish- request.php
168. Promises / Futures https://github.com/facebook/libphutil
169. $future  =  new  HTTPFuture(       'http://www.example.com/'   );   list($status,  $body,  $headers)  =       $future-­‐>resolve();
170. pushState
171. Bigpipe
173. Profile Menu Header LeftColumn RightColumn
178. Generate code
179. TSL early termination
180. Keep up to date
181. http://www.perfplanet.com/
182. Regardless of what you do: Measure it
183. Remember
184. Speed matters
185. https://joind.in/14255
186. http://twitter.com/BastianHofmann http://lanyrd.com/people/BastianHofmann http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann mail@bastianhofmann.de