Chapter 24 - Another Look at Blackfire
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Blackfire is the only product on the market that provides an end-to-end performance management solution that helps companies supervise application performance throughout the product lifecycle.
Let's quickly review Blackfire's role at each of these stages.
Using Blackfire during Development
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During development, developers can use Blackfire as a super-charged profiler on their local machines to:
- Debug identified performance problems (coming from monitoring alerts in production for instance);
- Measure and improve performance by spotting performance bottlenecks;
- Write tests to set a performance budget and avoid regressions (both unit tests and scenarios);
- Validate code changes when adding new features and fixing bugs by comparing profiles;
- Understand code behavior of unknown codebases at runtime;
- Fix quality or security issues discovered via Blackfire's recommendations.
Using Blackfire on Testing Servers
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On integration servers, Blackfire helps automate performance management by:
- Running tests to continuously check code behavior and performance sensitive functions;
- Running integration scenarios to find regressions and check the performance budget.
Using Blackfire on Staging Servers
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If you have access to a staging environment that replicates the production one, Blackfire can be used to:
- Validate performance improvements;
- Run integration tests with production-like data;
- Decide when code is ready to be deployed to production.
Using Blackfire on Production Servers
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On production servers, Blackfire is complementary to the monitoring system you already have in place. It allows you to:
- Identify the root causes of performance issues;
- Understand how your code behaves under stress;
- Find security issues even if no code changed (new vulnerabilities discovered in PHP for instance).
Conclusion
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Blackfire is a unique SaaS-delivered Performance Management Solution; it allows your development and DevOps teams to measure, compare, and improve performance at every step of the application development lifecycle.
We are always looking for great stories about how Blackfire has helped our users find bottlenecks and improve the performance of their apps. Feel free to Contact us if you are interested in sharing your experience with Blackfire.
Happy performance optimization!