Ayesha Siddiqui

Our worst week this year: a queue job that charged one customer three times

I post the wins here, so I should post this one too. UK ecommerce client, Laravel, a payment gateway the client chose (a smaller provider, not Stripe). Checkout puts a ChargeOrder job on the queue. The job had $tries = 3 with backoff, because "network errors happen". One evening the gateway was slow. The charge request took longer than our HTTP timeout, so the job threw a timeout exception. Laravel did exactly what…

Anyone running Laravel Octane on FrankenPHP in production? Memory and singleton horror stories wanted

We are moving one high traffic client API (about 4M requests a day, mostly reads, Redis cached) from php-fpm to Octane with FrankenPHP. Staging benchmarks look great, p95 from 48ms to 14ms. But I have done this long enough to know staging lies. Setup: PHP 8.3, Laravel 11, Docker, 2 containers behind a load balancer. Questions for people who actually run it in production: Memory growth: do you set --max-requests ,…

PHP in 2026 is actually good. Here are my receipts.

Every few weeks somebody in a thread here tells me PHP is dead. I run an 11 person agency in Karachi. This month PHP paid 11 salaries, our office rent, two laptops and a very expensive coffee machine. If this is death, it is a well paid one. But "it pays" is not an argument about quality, so here are actual receipts. And at the end, what is still bad, because I am not a fan club. Receipt 1: the language grew up PHP…

Enums, readonly and match: the PHP 8 features that made my juniors' code reviewable

Code review in my agency used to be 40% "what values can this string have?" and "who changed this amount after the controller?". PHP 8 killed most of those comments. Here are the features that did it, with the code we actually write now. 1. Backed enums (8.1) enum OrderStatus: string { case Pending = 'pending'; case Paid = 'paid'; case Shipped = 'shipped'; case Cancelled = 'cancelled'; public function label():…

The Dubai client who wanted us to rewrite in Node 'because PHP is old'

Story time, because this happened again this month and I want to have a link to send next time. Logistics client in Dubai. Laravel app we built in 2021, about 40k shipments a month, drivers, tracking page, invoices. They hired a new CTO from a big company. First meeting: "PHP is old, we need to rewrite in Node, NestJS, microservices. How long?" I did not argue. I said: give me two days to profile, and I will give…

not our office, but we just ordered the exact same plush…

Your Laravel app is not slow. Your loop is.

A Dubai client called last month. "The admin is slow, maybe we need a bigger server?" The orders page took 6.1 seconds. I opened Debugbar and the query counter said 1,214 . For one page. Of 50 orders. The server was fine. The loop was not. The code (simplified, but not by much) // OrderController@index $orders = Order::latest()->paginate(50); {{-- orders/index.blade.php --}} @foreach ($orders as $order) <tr> <td>{{…

Be honest. Which PHP version is your MAIN production app on?

Laravel queues that don't fall over: Horizon + Supervisor on a cheap VPS

Every few weeks a junior in my team (or a freelancer in my DMs) shows me a production server where the queue worker is running inside screen . It works until the server reboots, or the worker eats a bad job and dies at 3am, and then the client calls me asking why no invoices went out since Tuesday. Uff. So here is the setup we actually use. Nothing fancy. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS for about 12 dollars a month runs Redis,…

made a topic for the PHP people 🐘 php_still_pays. rule 1: post your PHP version, 5.6 and 8.3 are different languages. rule 2: the "PHP is dead" joke has been made, bring code or bring nothing. my agency payroll says hi