Performance

Articles about Performance by Sebastian Bergmann

A glowing cockpit instrument panel in deep blue light, its dials, throttle levers, and backlit gauges tracing speed and status: a metaphor for reading the telemetry your test suite records on every run.

June 17, 2026

What your test run already knows

On every run, PHPUnit knows how long each test took, how much memory it used, and why it failed. Most of that evaporates. otr-report reads it back out of the Open Test Reporting logfile and puts it within reach.

A mechanical stopwatch lies on a weathered wooden surface, waiting to be started. It symbolises how the duration of a test run has become a measurable factor that determines more than just developer convenience.

June 12, 2026

Speed as a security feature

How fast is your test suite, and what vulnerabilities does an LLM agent therefore fail to detect? What was long considered a productivity issue is now part of the security debate.

An astronaut in a detailed white spacesuit rides a small cyan-glowing rocket through deep, star-speckled space, leaning forward as a brilliant orange flame and a billowing trail of glowing exhaust streak out behind, with a single bright star shining in the upper right: a metaphor for taking a sluggish test suite and propelling it to blazing speed.

June 11, 2026

Turbo-Charging Your PHPUnit Suite

Slow tests destroy flow, kill TDD, and erode trust until nobody runs the suite. The fix has four tiers, and the biggest wins come from test design, not from infrastructure or parallelisation.

A glowing magnifying glass over a bug symbol, held by a hand, against a dark background of binary code and geometric patterns. A visual metaphor for the disciplined investigation of performance problems.

April 23, 2026

Debugging Performance in PHP

"It feels slow" is not a diagnosis. I explain the three disciplines that turn vague complaints into actionable data: tracing, profiling, and benchmarking.

The image shows a glass surface covered with fine water droplets or condensation. A large question mark has been painted or wiped onto this fogged-up glass. The background appears yellowish to greenish and blurred, so that the question mark clearly stands out as the central motif.

October 8, 2020

Caching makes everything faster. Right?

While working on PHPUnit, I encountered an interesting problem.

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