Blackfire

Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It’s essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP’s json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

Fast forward to this weekend when I received the following bug report from a user named Antonio:

This post demonstrates how Blackfire was used to identify slowness in the league/commonmark parser. These findings were then used to implement two simple optimizations resulting in a 53% performance boost!