Image: Pixabay Calling PHP a double-claw hammer is a bit of an in-joke in the PHP community . A lot of people bemoan PHP as a language – it's fashionable to do so and it seems to be a way to look clever. The joke came about from a blog post where somebody pointed out all of the problems with PHP (here's a rebuttal - https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/ ) Anyway, PHP is a warty language that sucks in academic circles but it doesn't matter because it's really good at web stuff, there are lots of people who know it (so it's cheap to hire), there are lots of libraries and frameworks (so it's cheap and fast to develop in). The commercial world is willing to overlook the academic warts. I'm busy helping to improve the performance of an API server. As part of my effort I'm profiling calls to the endpoints. I'm using Blackfire to generate call graphs and also logging the sql queries that the ORM is producing so that I can check...