Jorge Luis Betancourt discusses the implementation of Blackfire for continuous PHP performance monitoring at Trivago, highlighting the importance of performance in their business. The performance team utilizes a standardized workflow involving tools like Bitbucket and Jenkins to provide feedback quickly on changes that affect application performance. The primary goals include detecting bottlenecks, enforcing performance budgets, and fostering a platform for PHP developers to address performance issues.

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

4. 55 PLATTFORMS
1TB LOGS
/DAY~200ms
RESPONSE
TIME

5. @jorgelbgmSource: Google Trends

6. @jorgelbgmSource: Google Trends

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

8. Performance Team
Observability

9. @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

10. Our team provides support for …

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

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

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

15. A bit of history

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

17. @jorgelbgm
Before Blackfire

18. Current setup

19. @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

20. @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

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

22. Blackfire
In our Workflow

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

24. @jorgelbgm
Final workflow

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

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

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

28. Let’s see some examples

29. @jorgelbgm
Some examples
Something happened #

30. @jorgelbgm
Call Graph/
Memory
Timeline

31. @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.

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

33. @jorgelbgm
Conclusions

34. @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

35. @jorgelbgm

36. @jorgelbgm
Analyse ImproveMeasure

37. @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/

38. @jorgelbgm
Thanks!