Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Tideways 2023.2 Release

Since our last release announcement in April we have been working on a number of new features for Tideways that we are now happy to share with you. This is the second and final release for 2023. From here the team will be looking ahead to 2024, the 10th anniversary of Tideways’ launch, and preparing some amazing new features and improvements.

The PHP stat cache explained

90% of the time when I explain how the stat cache works in PHP, people are surprised because they expected it to work differently. It was invented to solve a very limited problem when you call several file system related operations on the same file in quick succession. Why should you know how it works? Because sometimes you need to work around the cache with the clearstatcache() function to get PHP code to run without errors.

Tideways 2023.1 Release

In the 4 months since the last release (2022.4), we have been working on a number of new features and improvements that we are pleased to share with you today as part of our 2023.1 release of Tideways. In addition to the new features, we also revamped our pricing and plans at the end of March under the umbrella of “Tideways 6”. The main difference is that all plans now include all features and are now limited by transactions as the primary metric. Summary.

A story of Lazy Loading File System Operations for better dev system performance

In this blog post I want to share a story of a performance bottleneck using the filesystem that we experienced in our development setup. In the Tideways backend, we have a simple homegrown database migration tool that scans a directory for.sql files and applies them if not already done. It is a very old piece of code that I used since before the times of doctrine/migrations. It is much simpler but works for us.

Refactoring with Deprecations

Deprecating old code and replacing it with new and improved APIs is an established process in software development. In the core of PHP APIs are provided to trigger and to get notified of deprecations. As a PHP application developer you can then hook into all triggered deprecations using a user defined error handler. You can use this API to collect deprecations and fix them.