Profiling Symfony & PHP apps with Blackfire

A single page took 400ms to load. Watch how methodical profiling identified the root cause and brought the final load time down to just 50ms.

#1about 5 minutes

Why application performance is critical for business

Slow page loads directly impact revenue and conversion rates, making performance a critical business concern that should be addressed early in development.

#2about 5 minutes

How Blackfire profiles applications on-demand

Blackfire's on-demand profiler has minimal overhead in production because it only activates for authorized requests, unlike other tools like Xdebug.

#3about 6 minutes

Differentiating between monitoring and profiling

Monitoring and tracing identify when and where performance issues occur, while profiling provides deep insights into function calls to understand why they happen.

#4about 7 minutes

Profiling a Symfony app with the browser extension

The first step in debugging is running a profile using the browser extension and analyzing the timeline view to find slow code paths.

#5about 17 minutes

Analyzing the call graph to find bottlenecks

The call graph visualizes function interactions, using inclusive and exclusive time to highlight the critical path and pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

#6about 6 minutes

Fixing an N+1 query problem in Doctrine

An inefficient method that loaded all comments into memory was replaced with a repository method that performs a direct SQL COUNT query.

#7about 7 minutes

Comparing profiles to validate performance fixes

Use the profile comparison feature to get objective data on the impact of code changes across dimensions like wall time, CPU, and memory.

#8about 14 minutes

Using recommendations to optimize PHP and Symfony

Blackfire's built-in recommendations help identify and fix common configuration issues related to PHP, OPcache, Composer autoloading, and framework settings.

#9about 12 minutes

Implementing caching to reduce database queries

Adding a cache layer for frequently calculated data significantly reduces the number of SQL queries and improves response time.

#10about 16 minutes

Automating performance testing with scenarios

Define performance tests and user scenarios in a .blackfire.yaml file to automate checks in CI/CD pipelines and prevent regressions.

#11about 7 minutes

An overview of Blackfire's monitoring features

Monitoring provides a high-level view of application health, tracks key transactions, and can automatically trigger detailed profiles when issues are detected.