App performance & efficiency: Blackfire pro tips & tools

Are you stuck in an endless cycle of hotfixes? It’s time to stop reacting to issues when they appear and start proactively enhancing your applications.

Explore implementing Blackfire with Thomas di Luccio. A robust observability solution, moving from reactive emergency fixes to strategic, data-driven, and long-term improvement at every stage of your development and deployment lifecycles.

Enterprise Symfony for the future: Platform.sh is the official Symfony Cloud Platform.

A bright, new offer powered by Platform.sh—adopted (and ❤️) by 16,000+ developers, 7,000 customers, and proven over the last 8 years—Upsun provides out-of-the-box capabilities that serve as the launchpad for creative development teams’ out-of-the-box thinking. A single, fully managed, self-service PaaS for development teams who just want to build their next, great application.

Links to check out: 👉 Get your free Upsun trial: https://brnw.ch/21wFxKr 👉 Learn more about Blackfire: https://brnw.ch/21wFxKp 👉 Get started with Platform.sh: https://brnw.ch/21wFxKj

Key moments: 0:00 - Intro

2:31 - Profiler

• Introduction to Blackfire Profiler as the primary tool for performance improvement.
• Importance of actionable insights and quick issue resolution.
• Features include session evaluation, cache information, and tracking HTTP requests/SQL queries.
• Profiler efficiently identifies and resolves performance issues during firefighting and regular coding tasks.

12:51 - Monitoring

• In this section, the speaker delves into the importance of monitoring practices for tracking real-time performance and stability metrics of applications.

21:06 - Observability toolbox

• Here, various tools and techniques are explored to enhance observability, including distributed tracing and structured logging, crucial for understanding complex systems.

21:27 - Enforcing performance and stability

• The speaker discusses strategies for enforcing performance and stability requirements throughout the development lifecycle, emphasizing techniques like setting service level objectives (SLOs) and implementing performance budgets.

21:47 - Performance tests

• This part covers the design and execution of performance tests to evaluate system behavior under different conditions, including types of tests, scenarios, and effective testing tools.

24:44 - Profiler

• The speaker introduces profiling as a method for identifying performance bottlenecks and optimizing code, explaining how profilers work and how to interpret results.

25:33 - Performance test automation

• Here, the focus is on automating performance tests to seamlessly integrate them into the development process, covering techniques for scripting tests and integrating with CI/CD pipelines.

27:02 - Secure critical user journeys

• Strategies for integrating security measures into performance testing practices are discussed here, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing security alongside performance.

27:48 - Plug your CI/CD pipelines

• This section explores the integration of performance testing into CI/CD pipelines, covering techniques for automating tests, analyzing results, and providing feedback within workflows.

28:20 - Build your own strategy

• The speaker encourages viewers to develop customized performance testing strategies tailored to their specific applications and requirements, providing guidelines for defining objectives and selecting tools.

29:24 - Use Blackfire on all environments

• Viewers are encouraged to use Blackfire, a performance profiling tool, across all environments, highlighting its benefits for consistent profiling and identifying performance issues.

30:03 - Blackfire summary

• This part summarizes the key features and benefits of Blackfire for performance profiling and optimization, emphasizing its integration with popular development frameworks.

30:16 - Deterministic observability

• Here, the importance of deterministic observability is discussed, emphasizing the need for consistent and reliable monitoring and tracing capabilities.

30:29 - Continuous profiling

• The concept of continuous profiling is explored, highlighting its integration into the development process to proactively identify and address performance issues.

31:02 - Discount

• This chapter refers to providing discounts for tools mentioned in the video, encouraging viewers to take advantage of special offers to support their performance testing efforts.

31:36 - Game

• Employ different tactics and tools to achieve success in performance testing and optimization.

32:41 - Questions 25:09 - Ending