How PHP executes bytecode
The Zend Engine ships five different bytecode executors, three of which are actually used. I look at how they differ, why they exist, and what all of this has to do with branch prediction in your processor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Caching makes everything faster. Right?
While working on PHPUnit, I encountered an interesting problem.
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