Deep Research and Measurement

Showing 10 records — All programmes

• Service & load

  September 16, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured today

  Question

  I measured PHP and Go on the same OAuth2 API: no gap at 10,000 writes, a real one at 50,000 reads

  The same API verifies an OAuth2 token on every request and then writes to or reads from PostgreSQL. On four cores, how much CPU do PHP-FPM, FrankenPHP worker mode and Go need for 10,000 writes and 50,000 reads a second?

  Finding

  At 10,000 writes a second all three candidates hit the target in five runs out of five, and none had a p99 above 2.5 ms: at this load the language is not a capacity line item. At 50,000 reads a second only Go held the target on four cores (p99 6.45 ms); PHP-FPM stopped at 23,528 and FrankenPHP at 22,859. CPU per read request is 64 microseconds for Go, 117 for FrankenPHP and 168 for PHP-FPM. Sized by instance, 50,000 reads take 3.4 cores in Go and 8.2–8.8 cores for the two PHP candidates. FrankenPHP's CPU saving does not turn into capacity: at saturation it leaves about one of its four cores idle.

  Measurement Medium confidence

• Language & runtime

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 25 days ago

  Question

  Laravel's preload curve: 123 files buy eight times what the last 1,912 do

  How far can a curated preload take Laravel, and what does each slice cost in start-up time?

  Finding

  The curve is not proportional to volume. The first 1,592 files — Laravel's own framework — buy 30 ms and add 1.2 seconds to start-up. The next 1,094 Symfony files buy 9.5 ms for free. The **123 files** after that (psr, carbon) buy 15.7 ms, more than the 1,094 before them. And the last 1,912 buy 1.8 ms while adding another 1.2 seconds. So the blanket preload the earlier record measured as a ceiling is the worst point on the curve that is not the origin: stopping at 2,809 files gives 12.77 ms for 1,514 ms of start-up, while 4,721 files ask 2,691 ms to reach 10.96 ms.

  Measurement High confidence

• Database & queries

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 25 days ago

  Question

  A partial index makes a queue table forty-one times smaller — for as long as the planner picks it

  On a Postgres queue table with millions of dead rows, what does a partial index buy, and when does the planner refuse to use it?

  Finding

  At 10 million dead rows a partial index sustains 11,537 claims per second where the same table without one manages 7. Against a composite index the throughput difference is small (6.9%) but the size difference is not: 7.6 MB against 310.4 MB, and the partial one does not grow with the table because it indexes only the 5,000 live rows. None of that is the real finding. The moment the planner switches a prepared statement to a generic plan the partial index stops being used at all — 11,752 tps becomes 7, and 0.68 ms becomes 1.1 seconds. A factor of 1,635. The composite index is untouched under the same conditions.

  Measurement High confidence

• Database & queries

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 25 days ago

  Question

  The partial index grew three hundred and five times in fifteen minutes — and autovacuum never ran

  Under sustained churn, does a partial index stay small on a queue table, and do the default autovacuum settings keep up with it?

  Finding

  With the live set holding steady at five thousand rows the partial index went from 0.125 MB to 38.2 MB — three hundred and five times. Its smallness comes from the live set, its bloat rate comes from throughput, and nothing connects the two. The composite index bloated less in proportion (42%) and more in absolute terms (+126 MB), and while bloating it stopped fitting in memory: its latency went from 0.52 ms to 61 seconds and its backlog climbed to 126,000. Fifteen minutes produced 1.75 million dead rows and autovacuum **did not run once** — the default threshold scales with the whole table (50 + 0.2 × 10 million ≈ 2 million) while the churn happens in a tiny subset.

  Measurement High confidence

• Database & queries

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 25 days ago

  Question

  Postgres never turned the partial index into a generic plan: forty executions, forty custom plans

  Does Postgres switch a partial-index query to a generic plan on its own inside a prepared statement — or is the 1,635-fold cliff something you have to opt into?

  Finding

  Postgres declines. On the partial index all forty executions used a custom plan — the counter reads 40/0. The reason it declines is the disaster itself: a generic plan cannot use the partial index, so its estimated cost comes out high and the planner does not choose it. The composite index switches at the sixth execution exactly as documented (5/35) and loses nothing by it. So the 1,635-fold cliff is real but fenced: reaching it takes writing `plan_cache_mode = force_generic_plan`.

  Measurement High confidence

• Frontend performance

  August 19, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 28 days ago

  Question

  How you import Chart.js decides how many kilobytes the visitor downloads

  In a real production build, what is the difference between `chart.js/auto` and a selective `Chart.register()` — in kilobytes?

  Finding

  Selective registration saves 9.7 kB gzip over `chart.js/auto` (67.8 → 58.1 kB, 14.3%). The larger drop is not in the library core but in leaving unused controllers out: a page that registers only the bar chart falls to 46.0 kB — two thirds of auto.

  Measurement High confidence

• Language & runtime

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 25 days ago

  Question

  opcache preload cuts the deploy bill by up to fourteen times — but five of seven frameworks do not hand it to you

  With `opcache.preload` on, how long is the first request seven PHP frameworks serve after a deploy, what does the gain cost, and who can actually have it?

  Finding

  Preload shortens the cold first request by between 3.5× and 14.2×: Symfony drops from 35.58 ms to 2.50 ms, down to Phalcon's bare figure. But only two of the seven candidates — Symfony and CodeIgniter — publish a preload file of their own; for the other five the gain sits on the table waiting for the user to write one. Writing one is not as easy as it looks: a preload generated blindly from the classmap never brings Symfony up at all, and on CodeIgniter it does worse (5.29 ms) than the hand-picked official file (3.13 ms). And the cost does not vanish: Laravel's classmap preload takes the 62 ms it saves each visitor and writes it back as 2,340 ms of php-fpm start-up.

  Measurement High confidence

• Language & runtime

  August 22, 2026

  4 metrics · 3 sources

  checked 25 days ago

  Question

  The PHP ecosystem does not wait for a new release — but it does not declare support either

  After a PHP release ships, when do the 500 most-installed Composer packages declare that they support it, and how much does that declaration actually say?

  Finding

  43.5% of installs arrive on a constraint with no upper bound at all — `symfony/console` says `>=8.4.1` today, which claims support for PHP 12 as well. Of the 280 packages that do close the top, 247 made the commitment before the version existed: `guzzlehttp/guzzle` covered 8.4 in October 2020, four years early. That leaves 33 packages that genuinely waited, at a median of 325 days. The raw medians fall version over version and read as an ecosystem speeding up; restricted to an equal observation window the trend reverses (238 → 215 → 325 days).

  Survey High confidence

• Tooling comparison

  August 20, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 27 days ago

  Question

  The fixed cost of installing a PHP framework: disk size tells you nothing

  How many megabytes on disk, how many files per request and how many milliseconds on the first request do seven PHP frameworks cost — and which of those numbers actually predicts throughput under load?

  Finding

  Disk size predicts nothing: Yii2 has the largest vendor tree at 34.1 MB and loads only 62 files per request, among the fewest in the field. Files per request predicts nothing either: CodeIgniter loads 96 files and serves 6,431 req/s, Symfony loads 224 and serves 13,067. The one number that genuinely separates them is the first request served with a cold opcache: 2.2 ms for Phalcon, 72.2 ms for Laravel — thirty-three times. That is the compile bill the first visitor pays after every deploy, and it is measured in tens of milliseconds, not kilobytes.

  Measurement High confidence

• Service & load

  August 20, 2026

  4 metrics

  measured 27 days ago

  Question

  Seven PHP frameworks under identical load: the gap narrows as soon as the request does real work

  On the same hardware, the same PHP build and the same seven routes, how many requests a second do Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii2, Phalcon, Laminas and Slim serve, and at what latency?

  Finding

  On an empty route the fastest is 4.4× the slowest (Slim 25,975, Laravel 5,966 req/s). As soon as the request does real work the gap closes: 3.7× for a single row from the database, 3.5× for twenty rows. Phalcon is third on an empty route and fifth once a query is involved — being a C extension buys nothing while the process waits on MySQL. And the expensive decision is not the framework: Laravel's own default `web` middleware group takes the same response from 5,858 to 2,176 req/s, so one default costs more than most of the distance between the frameworks.

  Measurement Medium confidence

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