Ten PHP anti-patterns — how many are you guilty of?
Some background first. Our setup is PHP plus three downstream services, seven figures of daily requests, peaking around nine in the evening.
Worth noting: the official docs do cover this, just in a very inconspicuous spot. I only found it reading the source comments, where the author explains the reasoning — roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".
// Minimal reproduction: you must use a real long-tail distribution here.
// Uniform load-test traffic will never trigger this.
func (s *Server) handle(ctx context.Context) error {
conn, err := s.pool.Acquire(ctx)
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("acquire: %w", err)
}
defer conn.Release()
return s.do(ctx, conn)
}The first thing was to collapse the variables. We were changing config and upgrading the version at the same time, and afterwards nobody could say which change caused what. We rolled back to moving one variable at a time, re-ran three times, and only then did the curve settle. Tedious, but not skippable.
We also fixed monitoring along the way: replaced average-based alerts with percentiles and split them per endpoint. False alerts dropped by about seventy percent and the on-call rotation visibly cheered up.
What genuinely surprised me was the tail. The average looked great while P99 jumped by an order of magnitude past some threshold. The cause was not PHP itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.