Recommendations ¶

A recommendation is a best practice that we advise you about in order to improve the performance of your application. Anytime you profile your application Blackfire can detect common performance bottlenecks and configuration issues. Solving them most of the time should have a significant impact on the performance of your app.

Technically, a recommendation is a built-in performance test, that shows up only when relevant. It depends for instance on the detected framework and whether you are in a development environment or not.

Recommendations are displayed in a dedicated tab on a profile view and in build reports (they do not impact the test results in terms of fail/pass). Any recommendation can be directly copied as a test that you'll paste in your .blackfire.yaml file. By clicking on the How to fix button near to it, you will be able to read more about the recommendation, and how to write the corresponding test.

Recommendations depend on your environment's configuration. A development environment's recommendations will differ from non-development environments, for instance with regards to caching strategies. Moreover, Blackfire offers you only recommendations that are relevant to your project type (Symfony, Laravel, Magento, Drupal, Ibexa,...).

For any feedback and ideas on recommendations, don't hesitate to Contact us.

Most recommendations aim at improving the performance of your code.

But Blackfire can detect a lot more than performance bottlenecks at runtime. A Blackfire test can be used to spot any unexpected or unwanted code behavior. That is also true for security and quality best practices.

In the following example, we profiled Finding Bigfoot, the application on which we demo all of Blackfire's features in Blackfire's book.

• PHP: Symfony, Laravel, Magento, Drupal, TYPO3, Prestashop, and Ibexa DXP
• Python: Django

Want to contribute and add more recommendations, on a supported framework or a new one? Contact us.

Whenever you start writing your tests, build statuses in Blackfire will only be conditioned by it. If your tests are green, and that one or more recommendations show up, the build status will still be green.

You can make sure that the recommendation is part of your tests by copy-pasting the yml code at the bottom of the recommendation documentation.

This also provides a way to adjust recommendations to your context and code base.

Recommendations may sometimes be false positives. In some cases, you might want to fully discard it.

To do so, add a recommendations: section to your .blackfire.yaml file, and list any recommendations that you would like to disable. You will find recommendation IDs, such as php.too_many_sql at the bottom of the recommendation documentation.

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# Configure recommendations.
recommendations:
    # Disable the 'You should execute less SQL queries' recommendation for a PHP app
    php.too_many_sql:
        enabled: false