PHP-FPM is pinned, response times spike, and the server CPU won't drop. It's not always the framework — it's often one hot function, a tight loop, an unindexed query, or a calculation repeated for every row.
I profile running PHP and find the exact functions and queries driving CPU, then prioritize the cheapest win.
Find what drives high CPU in PHP production.
Profiled a PHP backend where CPU was pinned at 100% during peak hours. Blackfire revealed a nested loop in a product comparison function that was doing O(n²) comparisons on a 50K-row dataset. Replaced with a hashmap lookup — CPU dropped to 15%.
You share profiling output plus slow-log/query timing, or I add a sampling profiler for a run. I cross-reference the CPU hotspots against the query log — if the CPU is in PHP code, I find the function; if it's in MySQL, I link it to query optimization. One focused session.
CPU profiling and a written diagnosis with the fix location and expected impact. Implementation is quoted separately.
Yes, with a sampling profiler (tideways/Blackfire) the overhead is small enough for production. I avoid Xdebug on live traffic.
I cross-reference PHP profiling against the MySQL slow log — if the CPU is in queries, I report that and link it to MySQL optimization.
Other problems I help with.
Profile and optimize PHP applications that are slow, memory-heavy or consuming too much CPU.
Details →Find what causes PHP memory usage to grow until the process dies.
Details →Diagnose why a PHP application is slow, no rewrite required.
Details →Optimize MySQL queries, indexes and schema for a production workload.
Details →Relevant production work.
Custom solution for collecting and evaluating traffic metrics with emphasis on processing speed and minimizing backend load.
Designed and built the backend for fast traffic metric collection and evaluation.
Crawler monitoring millions of products. Processing 30M products daily and comparing them.
Built and maintain the full crawling pipeline — from scraping through Elasticsearch indexing to price comparison.
Price intelligence engine for the US market. Processing large-scale product data.
Built the data pipeline and crawling infrastructure for large-scale US product monitoring.
Chat application with end-to-end encryption.
Built the backend and encryption layer for a secure chat application.
Find a job or offer your services.
Built the Go backend — API, matching logic and deployment.
Describe the problem in a few lines — I'll look at it and tell you what I think.