Codexworker

PHP Performance Optimization

Is your PHP application getting slower under load? I profile production PHP, find the real bottleneck — whether it's a slow query, a misconfigured opcache, repeated work in a loop or a memory leak — and optimize it.

I work with plain PHP and Symfony/Laravel stacks, using Xdebug, Blackfire, tideways and php-spx profiling data, plus query logs and slow-log analysis to back every change.

I'm a backend developer with 10+ years of experience across PHP, Go, MySQL and Elasticsearch. Recent work includes Cenoskop (30M+ products daily), Niftycent (US price intelligence), and facha.sk (Go backend). I build, fix and optimize backend systems that handle real data and real traffic.

What I Can Help With

Profile and optimize PHP applications that are slow, memory-heavy or consuming too much CPU.

Typical Problems

slow response times high memory usage CPU saturation missing or ineffective opcache repeated DB queries blocking I/O in request lifecycle slow autoloading inefficient ORM usage unbounded result sets

Relevant Experience

Profiled and optimized the PHP backend for Cenoskop (cenoskop.sk) — a price comparison engine processing 30M+ products daily. Used Blackfire to find hot paths in Symfony, fixed unbounded queries and opcache misconfiguration that were causing response time spikes under load.

What Is Included

PHP profiling setup (Xdebug/Blackfire/tideways)
opcache configuration review
hotspot identification
query log + EXPLAIN analysis
autoloading optimization
memory usage analysis
prioritized optimization plan

How It Works

You share what you see — timings, slow-log, profiling output. I reproduce the bottleneck with profiling, confirm the cause with data, implement the fix, and verify the improvement with before/after measurements. Most single hot paths take a few hours. Full profiling across an application takes a day.

Starting from €499

Full profiling and a written set of prioritized recommendations. Implementation of changes is quoted separately.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a PHP performance engagement start with?

A profiling pass — I instrument the application with Xdebug or Blackfire, reproduce the slow path, and identify the exact lines/functions responsible.

Can you optimize without a staging copy?

Yes — profiling and slow-log analysis only need read access. I avoid changing code in production; fixes are proposed and applied together.

Related Services

Other problems I help with.

Slow PHP Application? I'll Find the Bottleneck

Diagnose why a PHP application is slow, no rewrite required.

Details →

Why Is PHP Using So Much CPU?

Find what drives high CPU in PHP production.

Details →

PHP Memory Leak Investigation

Find what causes PHP memory usage to grow until the process dies.

Details →

MySQL Performance Optimization

Optimize MySQL queries, indexes and schema for a production workload.

Details →

Backend Performance Audit

Find and prioritize the real bottlenecks across your full backend stack.

Details →

Systems I've Built

Relevant production work.

Price Intelligence Engine

Cenoskop / Levnobot

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.

Data Aggregation Scraping ElasticSearch
US Price Intelligence

Niftycent

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.

Data Aggregation Scraping Big Data
Traffic Analysis

AnalyticsForWebsite

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.

Performance Optimization Data Collection
Secure Communication

Paidshield

Chat application with end-to-end encryption.

Built the backend and encryption layer for a secure chat application.

End-to-End Encryption Real-time Communication Security
Job & Services Marketplace

facha.sk

Find a job or offer your services.

Built the Go backend — API, matching logic and deployment.

Job Marketplace Services Go

Need Help With This?

Describe the problem in a few lines — I'll look at it and tell you what I think.

Request a PHP performance audit