1.
Jorge Luis Betancourt
Success of Blackfire and
Continuous PHP
performance monitoring at
@jorgelbgm1

2.
@jorgelbgm
Who am I
Software Engineer / Performance Team
Apache Nutch Committer & PMC
Member of @TheASF
Passionate about Search (Solr/ES),
metrics and performance

3.
55 PLATTFORMS
1TB LOGS
/DAY~200ms
RESPONSE
TIME

4.
@jorgelbgmSource: Google Trends

5.
@jorgelbgmSource: Google Trends

6.
• PHP & Symfony application
• Some services in other
languages (Java)
• HTML/CSS/JS
200 commits
per day +100 active
A/B tests

7.
Performance Team
Observability

8.
@jorgelbgm
Providing feedback to the developers as
soon as possible about the impact of
their changes on the performance of the
application.
Make trivago faster and spread the
culture of performance.
Mission

9.
Our team provides support for …

10.
• We’re not a performance company
• But … performance is important for
our business

11.
@jorgelbgm
Blackfire
• Performance
Management Solution
• Easy to install and use
• Provides an easy to use
UI

12.
@jorgelbgm
• Assertions & Tests
• Scenarios
Scenarios
Tests
Assertions
… over the collected metrics
and dimensions
Features

13.
A bit of history

14.
@jorgelbgm
Low hanging fruits …
https://www.slideshare.net/XoanVilas/how-synthetic-monitoring-helps-optimize-web-performance

15.
@jorgelbgm
Before Blackfire

16.
Current setup

17.
@jorgelbgm
PHP extension that collects resource consumption metrics
& keeps track of the call graph (only when the profiling is
enabled).
Agent to manage communication with the Blackfire
servers.
Configuration management

18.
@jorgelbgm
• Total independence between
environments
• Allow for changes in credentials/
agent config without restarting the
web servers
• Keeps configurations on the web
server to a minimum

19.
@jorgelbgm
Every server on the
company can have
Blackfire provisioned in a
few minutes

20.
Blackfire
In our Workflow

21.
@jorgelbgm
Bitbucket Integrations
• Bitbucket Server
• Jenkins
• InfluxDB
• PR based workflow
No official integration
No official integration
Webhook integration
!
"
!
! No official integration

22.
@jorgelbgm
Final workflow

23.
@jorgelbgm
Developers point of view
• Build status of the merge commit
• Comment on the Pull Request

24.
@jorgelbgm
• Notification in Slack
• Send the metrics to InfluxDB
More feedback

25.
@jorgelbgm
Trigger a build if …
Trigger a build when the response
time goes above a threshold

26.
Let’s see some examples

27.
@jorgelbgm
Some examples
Something happened #

28.
@jorgelbgm
Call Graph/
Memory
Timeline

29.
@jorgelbgm
Caching the SEO module
The contents of the SEO Module doesn't change often so we
should cache the Twig output in memcached.
This saves the Twig translation calls, etc.

30.
@jorgelbgm
Caching the SEO module (after we deployed)

31.
@jorgelbgm
Conclusions

32.
@jorgelbgm
• Detect performance bottlenecks before they’re deployed to
production.
• Enforce a backend performance budget to stop performance
degradation over time.
• Offer a common platform for PHP developers to discuss
performance related issues.
• Provides an easy syntax for writing/understanding the tests.
Conclusions

33.
@jorgelbgm

34.
@jorgelbgm
Analyse ImproveMeasure

35.
@jorgelbgm
Do you want to know more?
• https://tech.trivago.com/2017/10/27/continuous-performance-
monitoring-for-php---the-tale-of-blackfire-at-trivago/
• https://tech.trivago.com/2018/10/12/building-fast-and-reliable-web-
applications/

36.
@jorgelbgm
Thanks!