Performance terms
Every millisecond matters — here is how to win them back
Slow software costs money, loses users, and erodes trust. Performance engineering covers profiling, caching strategies, database query optimisation, network latency, memory management, and the architectural patterns that keep systems fast under real-world load. Most performance problems are invisible until they are not — these terms help you find and fix them before your users do.
HTTP/3 & QUIC
HTTP/3 runs over QUIC (UDP-based) instead of TCP — eliminating head-of-line blocking, reducing connection setup time, and improving performance on lossy networks.
2mo ago
performance advanced
PHP Async Frameworks PHP 8.1+
ReactPHP and Amp provide event-loop async I/O — enabling concurrent HTTP requests without blocking.
2mo ago
performance advanced
RoadRunner — Persistent PHP Worker PHP 8.0+
Go-based server keeping PHP workers alive between requests — eliminating per-request bootstrap cost.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Swoole / OpenSwoole PHP 7.4+
PHP extension with coroutines, async I/O, and built-in HTTP server — handling thousands of concurrent connections in one process.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Worker Pool Patterns PHP 5.0+
Fixed pool of pre-spawned workers for parallel tasks — avoiding per-task process spawn overhead.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Cache Stampede / Thundering Herd PHP 5.0+ When a cached item expires, multiple simultaneous requests all miss the cache and hit the database concurrently, overwhelming it.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Connection Pooling — pgBouncer & ProxySQL PHP 5.0+
External connection poolers sit between PHP-FPM and your database — multiplexing hundreds of PHP connections onto a small pool of real DB connections.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Database Connection Pool Sizing PHP 5.0+ The optimal pool size is smaller than you think — follow the formula (cores × 2) + effective_spindle_count rather than matching thread count.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Database Partitioning PHP 5.0+ Splitting a large table into physical segments by range, list, or hash — enabling partition pruning, faster archival, and parallel scans.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Database Sharding PHP 5.0+ Horizontally partitioning data across multiple database instances by a shard key, scaling write throughput beyond a single server's limits.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Materialized Views PHP 5.0+
Pre-computed query results stored as a real table — dramatically faster reads for expensive aggregations at the cost of periodic refresh overhead.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Object Pooling PHP 7.0+
Reusing a fixed set of pre-initialised expensive objects rather than creating and destroying them on every request — reducing allocation overhead.
2mo ago
performance advanced
PHP JIT — When It Helps (and When It Doesn't) PHP 8.0+
PHP 8.0's JIT compiler converts hot bytecode to native machine code — significant for CPU-bound code, but minimal for typical I/O-bound web requests.
2mo ago
performance advanced
PHP Preloading — Performance Impact PHP 7.4+
Quantifying preloading gains: most benefit on large frameworks (5–15%), negligible on tiny apps — how to measure and tune opcache.preload.
2mo ago
performance advanced
Tail Latency (p95, p99)
The latency experienced by the slowest requests — p99 is the response time below which 99% of requests fall, the most user-visible metric.
2mo ago
performance advanced