Best Tips for Improving Performance of Symfony
The Symfony Framework has emerged as one of the most flexible platform for building micro-sites, enterprise apps that manage about billions of connections. Also, this framework can serve as the basis for other frameworks. Since its launch in 2011, the community has learned much about what can be done with this platform to get the best out of it.
However, many times developers report that framework becomes slow. Having said, in this guide, we will disclose the best practices for improving on performance of Symfony framework. Below are some of the best practices and tips that can enhance Symfony performance.
Measure
You should never aim to optimize performance without measuring performance profile of each component. You can make use of tools to generate load with characteristics of estimate. You can make use of tools such as JMeter. Various SAAS tools such as “Loadimpact” can avoid the mechanism of setting up load generating hardware. It is essential that a load generator associates to an estimated load. You should not go too low or high. It is suggest to try about 2 to 3 times of expected load. Among the best practices is to increase load to discover breaking points for upcoming planning.
Profile
After running your load suit, you can look for bottlenecks in system. However, you should not try to fix it. Though it is obvious, but developers often think about a clever idea and implement it, thus improving on performance of a component by 20%, but not affecting overall performance even by slightest. A majority of times, the component’s contribution may be small to actual time taken.
You can use profilers for individual part of application and spend sufficient time on profiling before fixing. As per our experience, in case of slow request, 80 to 90 percent will be consumed in a specific part of request. This may be due to slow query or DOM binding. Many companies who are looking for Symfony developers prefer candidates who know about this technique.
You can choose from following tools for this purpose:
- PHP Layer: Symfony profiler, Blackfire
- FrontEnd: Google Chrome Developer Tools, Phantomas, PageSpeedInsight
- Database: Depending on a database. For instance, in case of MySQL, you can utilize inbuilt profiler and Jet profiler
Caching Fragments or Pages
Complete pages or portions in pages can be cached through Vanish + ESI. Also, in dynamic application, various views are present that is preferred for caching and requires not to be precise with actual information.
Improve & Implement
There are various strategies for enhancing individual part of a complex application. These parts can include frontend, App layer/Symfony, and database. In essence, development companies tend to hire Symfony developers who know about these strategies.
Also, you can cache actions where possible. According to developers working at Symfony development company, the biggest performance impact can be achieved through proper caching. We have already witnessed caching assets across browser cache, and usage of CDN in the front end part. In the app server layer, symfony development services tend to cache complete pages or portions of pages, and service level data.
This can bring down a request’s response time. Moreover, it can help in brining down overall load on system, making the cache misses serve fast.