The Symfony user group Zurich has been quite active a decade ago. But after a last meetup in 2015, we had no further activity. Mind you, 2015, so we can't even blame covid for it.
Finally, at the start of 2024 I and my team colleagues wanted to restart the user group. We are very happy that about 20 people showed up for this first meetup in 9 years. Emanuele Panzeri presented "Firefighting a Symfony & Elasticsearch app with Blackfire" and I did a demo of Symfony Messenger. The slides are available in our Github repository.
Firefighting a Symfony & Elasticsearch app with Blackfire
Emanuele covered the journey and findings of firefighting a complex Symfony application handling over 2 million requests per day. The application is built on top of multiple Symfony components and technologies like SF Messenger, SF Serializer, Varnish, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch. Emanuele had to investigate load spikes leading to server overload with the help of Blackfire.io.
The journey started at bottlenecks within the SF Serializer, caching serialized objects, digging into Elasticsearch APIs and its internals data structures.
The finale presented how the root cause was found to be Elasticsearch running on storage from a different data center attached over the network.
Symfony Messenger
While there are slides for this talk, the main part was showing Symfony Messenger in action. I showed the relevant code from the demo application to explain how Symfony Messenger is used in an application. I then also went over the key concepts of Symfony Messenger and message queues in general.
Symfony users from near and far
Liipers were quite present at the meetup. Emanuele and me did the presentations, Martin and Sarah attended and Jean-Pierre came all the way from the Far West, I mean Geneva (and thanks for the help with the catering and taking pictures, Jean-Pierre)! Other people traveled from Basel, St.Gallen, Rapperswil and many other places to get together in Zurich.
Next meetup when?
We intend to do a more regular meetup again, about 4 times a year. If you are interested, subscribe to the The meetup group to be informed as soon as we set the next date.
For the meetups, we need people who are willing to present something. If you have talk ideas, please contact me at david@liip.ch or on the meetup page.
We discussed at the meetup that people can suggest topics they would like to learn more about, and vote on topics. Use the discussion in our Github repository to suggest topics and vote for suggestions from others. And of course also tell if you could present one of those topics.
