Performance Tuning your Laravel & PHP Applications

Do you find your applications have started to become sluggish over time due to software bloat? Are your APIs taking seconds to return a response? In this month's talk, David Chang from Chefs Plate will be focusing on how to get started with addressing performance issues within your applications, and will talk about lessons they've learnt while improving their average API response times from over a second to sub-200 milliseconds.

Transcript

1. 2017.12.13
   Laravel TO
   

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2. Hello! I'm David
   I'm the Backend Team Lead at Chefs Plate.
   You can find me on Twitter and GitHub at
   @davidchchang
   

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3. We're Hiring
   (Intermediate/Senior) Front-End Developer
   Data Engineer
   Product Owner - Mobile
   IT Administrator
   Plus many more! Check out
   https://www.chefsplate.com/careers
   

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4. Optimizing PHP
   Application
   Performance
   

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5. Performance Checklist
   ❄ Why performance matters
   ❄ Identifying performance issues
   ☆ Finding the culprit (with profiling)
   ❄ Tackling root causes:
   ☆ Slow database queries
   ☆ Caching non-performant results
   ☆ Expensive function calls and operations
   ❄ Improving testing and development processes
   

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6. Why Performance Matters
   

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7. Why Performance Matters
   

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8. Speed Matters
   ❄ Better customer experiences
   ❄ Determines scalability
   ❄ Build and iterate faster
   ❄ Slower performance means more computing
   resources needed = more expensive
   

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9. Identifying Performance
   Issues
   First step: realizing you have a problem
   

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10. “I'm not a real programmer. I
    throw together things until it
    works then I move on. The real
    programmers will say: “Yeah, it
    works but you're leaking
    memory everywhere. Perhaps
    we should fix that". I'll just
    restart Apache every 10
    requests.”
    - Rasmus Lerdorf
    

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11. 80:20 rule (more like 95:5)
    ❄ Most of the times, 5-10% of your code base is
    causing 95%+ of your performance issues
    ❄ Performance dips tend to be tied to code releases
    ❄ Sometimes massive traffic can reveal
    infrastructure inadequacies
    

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12. Finding the Culprit
    Determine where the non-performant code is
    coming from
    "Knowing where to tap"
    

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13. Knowing where to tap
    

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14. Questions to Ask
    ❄ How long do your pages take to load?
    ❄ Is every request slow?
    ☆ What are your most frequently-used pages
    and endpoints?
    ☆ Is there any code in common across those
    pages?
    ❄ Did we release something recently that caused
    the slowdown?
    

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15. Cue: Application Performance Monitoring
    ❄ APMs like New Relic and Datadog help to reveal
    underlying performance issues
    ❄ View high level performance metrics with enough
    granularity of specific issues
    ❄ Can define thresholds for acceptable
    performance and set up monitoring notifications
    to get notified when application performance
    degrades
    

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18. Track execution times with chefsplate/php-profiler!
    

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19. Example usage of chefsplate/php-profiler
    

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20. When It's Not Your Code
    ❄ It could be an infrastructure issue
    

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21. Slow DB Queries
    Majority of taps
    

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22. Creating Database Indexes
    ❄ Look-ups and queries perform dramatically faster
    with the right indexes
    ❄ Look at what is frequently accessed in your
    queries
    ❄ There are some caveats:
    ☆ Don't index everything
    ☆ Order of indexes can matter as well
    

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23. Adding a database index usually improves query performance
    Source: CodeProject, Benchmarking with indexed views
    

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24. Offloading to the Database
    ❄ Offload as much of the application code back to
    the database wherever possible
    ❄ Don't fetch objects into PHP and parse/populate
    them when you can do it straight in the DB
    ❄ Utilize built-in aggregation and reporting
    frameworks if available
    

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25. 20,000+
    milliseconds!!
    

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26. Offloading reporting logic from PHP to Mongo aggregations
    

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27. Create-if-not-exists Queries
    ❄ Generating random unique numbers can be
    expensive on larger tables/collections
    ☆ One solution: Retryable writes with unique
    indexes will throw errors; catch exceptions
    instead of querying for matches
    

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28. Decoupling Database Tests
    ❄ Improve unit tests by decoupling and mocking
    database calls
    ❄ Don't confuse integration or API tests with unit
    tests
    

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29. Caching
    For frequently accessed content
    

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30. Caching Guidelines
    ❄ Cache frequently accessed content
    ☆ Especially if the content doesn't change often
    ❄ Useful for "aggregated" content
    ☆ e.g. content that requires multiple DB queries
    to assemble
    ❄ Always provide a fallback in case caching fails
    ❄ Make sure to wrap appropriate exception
    handling logic around your cache calls
    

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31. Using the Laravel cache + fallback to populate
    

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32. Cache entire Laravel responses with Spatie's response cache package
    

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33. ❄ Great for caching entire responses
    ☆ Considers input parameters when caching
    ❄ Caching on a per-endpoint basis
    ❄ Not too much flexibility in busting caches
    ☆ All-or-nothing approach
    Spatie Response Cache
    

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35. ❄ Save calls to the database for commonly accessed
    immutable data
    ❄ Only first call to a singleton entity should incur a
    performance hit
    ❄ Retrieve further entities from memory directly
    ❄ Similar to APC cache
    Singleton Entities
    

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37. Expensive Calls
    Not all function calls are made equal
    

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38. "Performance problems in
    ecommerce are almost always
    due to making too many calls
    rather than the response time of
    any given call."
    — Kelly Goetsch, eCommerce in
    the Cloud
    

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39. Host-to-host communication is expensive
    Source: Geeks Hangout, The OSI Model
    

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40. Start Low Level
    ❄ Start from the bottom and then work your way
    up
    ☆ Database
    ☆ Laravel MVC Framework
    ■ Data/persistence layer (with Eloquent
    ORM/Doctrine ODM)
    ■ Domain layer (models)
    ■ Middleware
    ■ Controllers
    ☆ Templates and Views (Frontend)
    

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41. ❄ Improve performance by serving up assets closer
    to your user base
    ❄ Reduce load on your web servers
    ❄ Automatic mobile image optimizations
    ❄ Leverage gains from GZIP compression and
    HTTP/2 server push
    Content Delivery Networks
    

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42. Performance gains from using Cloudflare CDN
    

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43. Some Things We've Tried
    ❄ Swapping out Hash::check bcrypt calls with
    native SHA1 hashing via hash()
    ☆ Hashing operation went from 192ms to 4ms
    ❄ Enabling APCu caching for Doctrine metadata:
    ☆ Saved ~60ms per request
    

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44. ❄ Replacing splat type-hints (Class … $val)
    syntax with plain array setting
    ☆ This ended up being 3X faster
    ❄ Removing magic setters and getters
    ☆ ~0.0009ms - not worth it!
    Some Things We've Tried
    

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45. Testing & Dev Processes
    Other areas for optimizations
    

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46. "Only conducting performance
    testing at the conclusion of
    system or functional testing is
    like conducting a diagnostic
    blood test on a patient who is
    already dead."
    — Scott Barber
    

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47. Performance Testing
    ❄ Performance testing would be ideal to integrate
    into your CI
    ❄ Log ms before and after
    ❄ Maintain a specific level of performance
    

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48. Speeding Up your Testing
    ❄ Extract out your database calls
    ❄ Mock expensive or difficult to reproduce calls
    (esp. third party)
    ❄ Run tests in parallel
    ❄ Build in performance into your development
    considerations
    ☆ Overall speed up of your CI process
    

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49. Improve testing performance with Paratest
    

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50. Save your life with hirak/prestissimo
    

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51. Save your Life with prestissimo
    ❄ Makes composer installs at least ten times faster
    ❄ Just type:
    composer global require hirak/prestissimo
    ☆ There's no turning back
    ❄ Our installs went from 15+ minutes to 17 seconds
    ❄ TODO: Buy this guy a beer
    

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52. There's no turning back once installed
    

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53. Recap
    Use APMs and
    profilers to help you
    identify performance
    issues
    Apply
    indexing and
    caching
    techniques &
    avoid
    expensive
    calls
    Profit!
    (even more
    than usual!)
    

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54. Thanks!
    Questions?
    

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55. Happy Holidays
    and a Happy New Year!
    From your @LaravelTO friends
    

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56. ❄ Feb 27, 2018: Presentation TBA
    ❄ Apr 25, 2018: Video Chat with Taylor Otwell
    ❄ Jun 20, 2018: Workshop with Adam Wathan
    Upcoming Meetups
    

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