How To Profile PHP Applications with Xdebug, Laragon, and Q Cache Grind

7 minute readWhen trying to speed up your PHP web applications, it sure helps to know where the bottle necks are. That’s where Xdebug and Q Cache Grind can help: they can tell you which functions and class methods are taking up the most time and memory, how many times they’re called, and who called them. With this information, it’s far easier to speed up your code than “shooting in the dark” by just trying to optimize everything.

WordCamp Vancouver 2018 Memory Dump

9 minute readAbsolutely everything I can remember from my WordCamp experience this year. Feel free to just skip to the sections that interest you… (And thanks Esther for the photo of Scott, myself, and Jason on the ferry!) Preparation I sent a message out to my WordPress meetup and “WordPress professionals” group asking if anyone wanted to […]

PHP's array_shift Performance

< 1 minute readPHP’s array_shift is a relatively slow way to fetch the first item from an array; it’s much better to use reset. For example, array_shift() modifies the original array and can be pretty slow because it needs to completely reindex the array (remove first element then shuffle everything else forward by one “slot”), so unless you […]