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, Blackfire.io, Tideways.io 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
15. http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann
17. Why should you care?
18. It is really important
21. Every ms counts
25. So what is pagespeed?
26. Server
27. Your PHP application Request Response
28. Your PHP application Request Response Load balancer
29. Your PHP application Request Response Load balancer
30. web server db http service http service cache user request
31. But there is more
36. http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/
37. So what happens on your server is really important
38. But the rest is as well
39. Step 1
40. Measuring
48. So you need to measure at your users side
49. Navigation Timing API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/ Navigation_timing
51. Resource Timing API http://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/
53. For older browsers you have to do it yourself
54. https://github.com/lognormal/boomerang
56. Getting it back to the server
57. Tracking request
58. https://tracking.example.com/? page=profile&backend=123&co mplete=890&domReady=580
59. logstash http://logstash.net/
60. input filter output
61. Very rich plugin system
62. browser JS: boomerang logstash trackingServer access log requests tracking image with timing information as query parameters
63. Graphing it
64. Graphite http://graphite.wikidot.com/
66. browser JS: boomerang logstash trackingServer access log requests tracking image with timing information as query parameters graphite statsd
67. input {
 file {
 type => "pagespeed-access"
 path => [ "/var/log/nginx/ access_log/monitoring-access.log" ]
 }
 }
68. 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"]
 }
 }
69. output { statsd { type => "pagespeed-access" exclude_tags => ["_grokparsefailure"] host => "localhost" port => 8126 namespace => "pagespeed" sender => "" timing => [ "%{page}.connect", "% {connectTime}", ... ] } }
71. Can we measure more?
72. Load balancer
73. input {
 file {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 path => [ "/var/log/ haproxy-http.log*" ]
 }
 }
74. filter {
 grok {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 pattern => "%{HAPROXYHTTP}" 
 }
 mutate {
 type => "haproxy-http-log"
 gsub => [
 "server_name", "\.", "_",
 "client_ip", "\.", "_"
 ]
 }
 }
75. 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}"
 ]
 }

76. 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
77. From within your PHP app
78. From your JS frontend
79. Slow query logs
80. More fine grained metrics
81. By pages
82. By browser
83. By country
84. Logged in / out
85. Heavy users
86. Define goals
87. Anomaly detection
88. http://codeascraft.com/2013/06/11/introducing-kale/
89. Step 2
90. How to find out where the problems are
91. Profiling
93. xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 1 http://url?XDEBUG_PROFILE
94. Webgrind https://github.com/jokkedk/webgrind
96. Use it locally on your dev machine
97. XHProf https://github.com/facebook/xhprof
98. Use it in production for a subset of requests
99. XHGUI https://github.com/perftools/xhgui
104. php-meminfo https://github.com/BitOne/php-meminfo
105. Blackfire https://blackfire.io/
106. Tideways https://tidyways.io/
109. New Relic http://newrelic.com/
111. Symfony Debug Toolbar
114. Extend it http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/profiler/ data_collector.html
121. Aggregate it
123. Step 3
124. Fix it
125. That's something you have to do
127. Some hints on better performance
128. GZIP
129. CDNs
130. DNS provider
131. Test them
132. Optimize your web server
133. https://istlsfastyet.com/
134. DB Indexes
135. Minify JS https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
136. Minify CSS http://sass-lang.com/
137. Concatenate JS/ CSS/...
138. Correct caching headers
139. Opcache
140. Data Caching
141. APCU
142. memcached
143. PHP 5.6 https://blog.asmallorange.com/2013/08/php-roadmap- performance/
144. Are you using your libraries correctly?
145. Symfony
146. Doctrine
147. DI container
148. SPDY/HTTP 2.0
149. Minimize redirects
150. Check image compression https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-imagemin
151. Compress HTML
152. Check YSlow, Pagespeed
153. DNS prefetch
154. <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//host_name_to_prefetch.com">
155. <link rel="preload" href="//host_name_to_prefetch.com">
156. Move logic to async workers
157. Precompute expensive stuff
158. Varnish
159. ESI
160. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu Institution
161. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu <esi:include src="..." /> Institution
162. Load content asynchronously
163. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu Institution
164. Profile Publications Publication Publication Publication AboutMe LeftColumn Image Menu <div id="placeholder"></div> <script>loadWidget('/aboutMe', function(w) { w.render({ replace : '#placeholder' }); })</script> Institution
165. Flush content early
170. Move logic to shutdown handlers
171. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown- function.php
172. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fastcgi-finish- request.php
173. Promises / Futures https://github.com/facebook/libphutil
174. $future = new HTTPFuture( 'http://www.example.com/' ); // do something else list($status, $body, $headers) = $future->resolve();
175. pushState
177. TSL early termination
178. Keep up to date
179. http://www.perfplanet.com/
180. Regardless of what you do: Measure it
181. Remember
182. Speed matters
183. http://twitter.com/BastianHofmann http://lanyrd.com/people/BastianHofmann http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann mail@bastianhofmann.de