The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by Reza Lavaryan showing you how to "supercharge your applications" with the help of the Blackfire.io profiling service.

With profiling, we can spot the performance bottlenecks in the code and do something about them. There is a variety of profiling tools out there, each taking a different approach. [...] With profiling, we can spot the performance bottlenecks in the code and do something about them. There is a variety of profiling tools out there, each taking a different approach. [...] Blackfire.io is the new generation of web profilers, which takes the automatic instrumentation approach, but without imposing a performance impact on our application.

First he defines some of the basic terms it's helpful to know when profiling and using Blackfire. He then walks you through getting what you'll need set up:

• a Homestead VM instance with the necessary configuration options
• a script using Faker to generate and write user data to a local database

He then shows you how to execute the first profiling run and what the results look like in the Blackfire views. He uses these results to make some modifications to the script and re-runs the tests to see what kind of gains it provides. Most of his examples use the web interface for the service but the post ends with a look at using the command line tool and getting back some simple metrics as a result.