Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

What You Need to Know About PHP Certifications

In this video, Adam Culp, Manager of Professional Services at Perforce Zend, explains why validating your skills via a PHP certification can be an essential investment for modern developers and organizations. Earning a PHP certification (such as the Zend PHP Certification) can help ensure that you and your team are aligned with industry standards and capable of delivering reliable, high-quality code. The exam covers critical topics through PHP 8.4, including object-oriented programming, security, and error handling.

PHP Support for Enterprise Applications

Building secure and observable systems is essential, but what happens when issues arise in your enterprise applications? In this clip from “How to Build a PHP Security Roadmap,” Zend Principal Product Manager Matthew Weier O’Phinney explores strategies and PHP support options for identifying and resolving issues in your enterprise PHP applications.

PHP 8.5 Garbage Collection Improvements

Big optimizations in PHP’s memory consumption have become exceedingly rare. Since then, memory improvements have been smaller in scope, focusing on little details for certain types of variables. Like improving the Garbage Collector (GC) in edge cases, which Iljia Tovilo contributed to PHP 8.5 titled “Mark enums and static fake closures as not collectable”.

Tideways 2025.4 Release

In our fourth Release of 2025, we included PHP 8.5 support on the day of its release and Heartbeats to monitor your application’s pulse more closely than ever. If something is offbeat, you’ll receive timely alerts. We improved alerting by introducing fine-granular transaction level response time and made automatic tracepoint triggers more powerful.

PHP Configuration Essentials for DreamFactory: Critical Settings You Need to Know

This guide focuses on the critical configurations every DreamFactory administrator must understand: memory_limit, upload_max_filesize, post_max_size, PHP-FPM worker settings, and the often-overlooked configuration hierarchy where pool settings override php.ini values.

PHP Benchmarks: 8.5 vs 8.4, 8.3 and 7.4

Each year, right on schedule, a new version of PHP is released at the end of November. So, how much faster is this new release across popular frameworks and applications? Our tests show that, in general, the performance between 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 does not move much for a Laravel, Symfony and WordPress demo application. Moving to the newest PHP version isn’t a magic shortcut to better performance. Not everything is bleak, though.

What's new in PHP 8.5 in terms of performance, debugging and operations

The close of 2025 is near, and that also means a new version of PHP is about to be released: 8.5! There has already been some discussion regarding the latest features and modifications affecting developers, for example on Laravel News, PHP.Watch or the Zend Blog. In this post we are highlighting just the performance, debugging, and operations-related changes in PHP 8.5 that you will not find in the posts listed above. Several of these changes were even contributed by Tideways employees.

PHP 8.1 EOL: What You Need to Know

Time’s almost up on PHP 8.1 – do you have an upgrade strategy ready? With PHP 8.1 end of life occurring on December 31, 2025, it is critical to plan your upgrade strategy now. Zend can help. In this video, we provide an expert guidance on how to update PHP, including an incremental upgrade strategy for moving from PHP 8.1 and a look at how to upgrade PHP 8.1 to 8.2 and beyond. For teams unable to upgrade before the deadline, we also go through long term support (LTS) options. Using LTS provides essential security patches and expert support to keep your applications secure and compliant.

Debugging a running PHP process by attaching GDB

We are noticing that some of our requests are starting to get slow and server load increases. Checking the process list of our server, for example with htop reveals that our FPM workers are taking up all of our CPU time. Checking the health with our basic toolset of lsof to show open network connections and strace to show syscalls does not reveal any activity. This means that the workers are spending time processing data without any externally visible activity.