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PHP 8.6 will include a new Polling API (RFC) that was developed as part of the PHP Foundation’s “Stream Improvement” project. Since we at Tideways place a special emphasis on PHP performance, we see this as a significant improvement for PHP users; one that has so far gone largely unnoticed by the PHP community. We hope that a wider audience will recognize its potential.

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 300 Shopware 6 stores over the first half of 2026 and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types: Product details, Category, Search, and Homepage. We previously made these benchmarks for 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, and the second half of 2025.

How does your Magento 2 store’s PHP backend performance compare to other operators of Magento in general? To answer this question, we have aggregated and anonymized performance data from over 250 Magento 2 stores over the first half of 2026 and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types: Product details, Category Page, Search, and Homepage. We previously made this benchmark for Q2 2025.

This Release introduces AI Performance Insights, expanding the Tideways CLI with access to monitoring, exception tracking, Slow SQL, and trace data for agentic performance analysis. We added PHP 8.6 compatibility and improved trace views and instrumentation. We’ve also added a broad range of new framework- and ORM-specific bottleneck detections for Shopware, Magento, Laravel, Symfony, and Doctrine.

In discussions about PHP performance optimizations and micro-optimizations, there is often someone hand-waving the discussion down with, “PHP is rarely the bottleneck; I/O is.” But is that really true? Our data shows otherwise: across 1240 production projects, the average time spent in PHP is 40.3%. For 34% of these projects, they even spent more than 50% of their time in PHP, not in I/O. So, PHP often is the bottleneck, and depending on the framework, the effect is even higher.

When you want to know the last time some user was seen or some resource was accessed/viewed, then usually you reach to a timestamp column and update this to the current time whenever it’s seen or accessed. You may have written this kind of SQL statement (or the equivalent) in your ORM yourself a few times: It looks innocent, but even on reasonably small tables, this can cause slow UPDATE statements regularly.