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In our fourth Release of 2025, we included PHP 8.5 support on the day of its release and Heartbeats to monitor your application’s pulse more closely than ever. If something is offbeat, you’ll receive timely alerts. We improved alerting by introducing fine-granular transaction level response time and made automatic tracepoint triggers more powerful.

Each year, right on schedule, a new version of PHP is released at the end of November. So, how much faster is this new release across popular frameworks and applications? Our tests show that, in general, the performance between 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 does not move much for a Laravel, Symfony and WordPress demo application. Moving to the newest PHP version isn’t a magic shortcut to better performance. Not everything is bleak, though.

The close of 2025 is near, and that also means a new version of PHP is about to be released: 8.5! There has already been some discussion regarding the latest features and modifications affecting developers, for example on Laravel News, PHP.Watch or the Zend Blog. In this post we are highlighting just the performance, debugging, and operations-related changes in PHP 8.5 that you will not find in the posts listed above. Several of these changes were even contributed by Tideways employees.

We are noticing that some of our requests are starting to get slow and server load increases. Checking the process list of our server, for example with htop reveals that our FPM workers are taking up all of our CPU time. Checking the health with our basic toolset of lsof to show open network connections and strace to show syscalls does not reveal any activity. This means that the workers are spending time processing data without any externally visible activity.

The database is often the source of performance problems in PHP applications, but there are many different reasons why this is the case. The most straightforward is that individual queries that the application issues are slow, due to their inefficient structure, by not using indexes or other coding mistakes. But for MySQL databases, a common problem is also the misconfiguration of the server itself.

One of our recurring jobs at Tideways is to ensure that all of our instrumentation works with new and upcoming PHP versions. For us, “working” doesn’t just mean that the results are correct, but that your PHP extension is fast, gathering insights for our customers with a minimal performance overhead.

FrankenPHP bills itself as “The Modern PHP App Server” and provides a single-process solution to running PHP. Its worker mode allows to greatly increase the performance of cleanly developed applications that are compatible with it by saving on framework bootstrapping time. Unfortunately, not every application is compatible with worker mode. Depending on the amount of global state kept by the application, updating it for worker mode is not always easy.

Welcoming bots and crawlers to your site is a necessary part of operating any web application or e-commerce store. That relationship turns sour when they engage in excessive behavior and adversely affect the performance for regular users. Our customer Greenstories experienced a 10-fold slowdown in performance and a failure rate of 6% over a few hours when a crawler visited their store and messed with the Shopware cart functionality.

How does your Shopware 6 store’s PHP backend performance compare to other operators of Shopware in general? To answer this question, we have aggregated and anonymized performance data from over 200 Shopware 6 stores over the last quarter and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types.

The close of 2024 is near, and that also means a new version of PHP is about to be released: 8.4! There has already been some discussion regarding the latest features and modifications affecting developers, for example on either stitcher.io or php.watch. We wrote this post with a totally different angle, highlighting the performance, debugging, and operations-related changes in PHP 8.4 that are usually less publicized. If you are here to find out: Is PHP 8.4 faster than previous versions?