Blackfire.io, the PHP performance profiling service, has announced a series of webinars aimed to help you learn more about the service and how it can help you get the most out of your code. These webinars are spread out all across the globe so anyone can attend at a timezone-appropriate hour.

Here's the list for the October and November sessions:

• [Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session)](Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session))
• Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – European Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – US Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 21st, 2018 – Asian Session)

You can find out more about the contents of each sessions - "Getting Started with Blackfire", "Introduction to Blackfire" and "Automating Performance Testing with Blackfire" - by clicking on the link for the related event. If you're interested at all in improving the performance of your application, check one of these webinars out. Blackfire offers their "Hack" level of support to try out for free too so there's no reason not to give it a shot!

On the Trivago Tech blog they've shared some of their experience in continuous performance improvements in PHP applications and how the Blackfire.io service helped them get their best performance.

Our mission is to provide the user with the ideal hotel at the lowest rate. Our backend consists of several services written in different languages. To succeed at this goal we do complex tasks in our main application developed in PHP. While doing this we need to keep the website as fast as possible.

We started to look for some tool that could help us identify performance issues in our code base. We evaluated Blackfire and decided that it was a good fit for our use case.

The article starts by answering the question of "why Blackfire?" and continues on, showing how they integrated it with their workflow. They use the SaltStack tooling to set up servers and configure them so it was just a matter of integrating the Blackfire agent and probe extension via that. They include an overall diagram of how it fits into the architecture and how they worked around the lack of Bitbucket server support. The post finishes with some examples of performance metrics from before and after the optimizations from their results stored in InfluxDB.

On the Blackfire.io blog a new tutorial has been posted by Julien Pauli looking at some of the features of PHP 7 and how they relate to the overall performance in this latest major version of the language. In this first post in the series Julien talks about packed arrays.

This blog series will show you what changed inside the Zend engine between PHP 5 and PHP 7 and will detail how you, as a developer, may effectively use the new internal optimizations. We are taking PHP 5.6 as a comparison basis.

[...] Packed arrays is the first great PHP 7 optimization. Packed arrays consume less memory and are a bit faster in many operations than traditional arrays.

He gets into the specifics of how the packed arrays work, mentioning the internal optimization the language does, requiring no intervention in user-land code. He shows the difference between the PHP 5.6 performance and PHP 7 using the Blackfire.io tool - a difference of about a 70% gain.

As is mentioned in this new post to the Laravel News site, the Homestead development environment now comes with support for the Blackfire.io profiler.

Blackfire Profiler by SensioLabs automatically gathers data about your code's execution, such as RAM, CPU time, and disk I/O. Homestead makes it a breeze to use this profiler for your own applications. All of the proper packages have already been installed on your Homestead box, you simply need to set a Blackfire ID and token in your Homestead.yaml file

With the configuration set up, the only installation the user needs to make is setting up the companion extension (Chrome) for your browser.