Performant PHP Skill

Goal

Build fast, type-safe, maintainable PHP services using the current ecosystem (versions verified 2026-06-10). This is the language-level companion to performant-laravel.skill.md; use it for general PHP, Symfony, and framework-agnostic work.

Capabilities

1. Modern language baseline

• Target PHP 8.4+ (8.5 current stable). Use property hooks and asymmetric visibility (8.4) to remove boilerplate getters/setters; lazy objects (8.4) for deferred initialization; PDO driver-specific subclasses. On 8.5, the pipe operator |> chains callables and the built-in URI extension parses/normalizes URLs (RFC 3986 / WHATWG).
• Always declare(strict_types=1);. Use readonly classes/properties, enums (backed where serialized), first-class callable syntax, and constructor property promotion.

2. Runtime performance

• OPcache must be enabled in production; tune opcache.memory_consumption, opcache.max_accelerated_files, and opcache.validate_timestamps=0 (with deploy-time cache reset).
• JIT (available 8.3+) more than doubles throughput on CPU-bound work (benchmarks ~+110%); negligible/negative for typical I/O-bound web requests — enable and measure, don't assume.
• FrankenPHP worker mode (Caddy-based app server) keeps the framework booted between requests — large latency wins for Laravel/Symfony; also gives Early Hints and real-time (Mercure). Alternative: RoadRunner or Swoole/OpenSwoole.
• Use preload for hot framework classes.