Simplest way to profile a PHP script

Question

What s the easiest way to profile a PHP script   I d love tacking something on that shows me a dump of all function calls and how long they took but I m also OK with putting something around specific functions   I tried experimenting with the microtime function    then   microtime    myFunc     now   microtime     echo sprintf  Elapsed    f    now- then     but that sometimes gives me negative results   Plus it s a lot of trouble to sprinkle that all over my code

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Honestly  I am going to argue that using NewRelic for profiling is the best   It s a PHP extension which doesn t seem to slow down runtime at all and they do the monitoring for you  allowing decent drill down   In the expensive version they allow heavy drill down  but we can t afford their pricing model    Still  even with the free standard plan  it s obvious and simple where most of the low hanging fruit is   I also like that it can give you an idea on DB interactions too

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Cross posting my reference from SO Documentation beta which is going offline  Profiling with XDebug An extension to PHP called Xdebug is available to assist in profiling PHP applications  as well as runtime debugging   When running the profiler  the output is written to a file in a binary format called  quot cachegrind quot    Applications are available on each platform to analyze these files   No application code changes are necessary to perform this profiling  To enable profiling  install the extension and adjust php ini settings  Some Linux distributions come with standard packages  e g  Ubuntu s php-xdebug package   In our example we will run the profile optionally based on a request parameter   This allows us to keep settings static and turn on the profiler only as needed    php ini settings   Set to 1 to turn it on for every request xdebug profiler enable   0   Let s use a GET POST parameter to turn on the profiler xdebug profiler enable trigger   1   The GET POST value we will pass  empty for any value xdebug profiler enable trigger value    quot  quot    Output cachegrind files to  tmp so our system cleans them up later xdebug profiler output dir    quot  tmp quot  xdebug profiler output name    quot cachegrind out  p quot   Next use a web client to make a request to your application s URL you wish to profile  e g  http   example com article 1 XDEBUG PROFILE 1  As the page processes it will write to a file with a name similar to  tmp cachegrind out 12345  By default the number in the filename is the process id which wrote it   This is configurable with the xdebug profiler output name setting  Note that it will write one file for each PHP request   process that is executed   So  for example  if you wish to analyze a form post  one profile will be written for the GET request to display the HTML form   The XDEBUG PROFILE parameter will need to be passed into the subsequent POST request to analyze the second request which processes the form   Therefore when profiling it is sometimes easier to run curl to POST a form directly  Analyzing the Output Once written the profile cache can be read by an application such as KCachegrind or Webgrind  PHPStorm  a popular PHP IDE  can also display this profiling data   KCachegrind  for example  will display information including   Functions executed Call time  both itself and inclusive of subsequent function calls Number of times each function is called Call graphs Links to source code  What to Look For Obviously performance tuning is very specific to each application s use cases   In general it s good to look for   Repeated calls to the same function you wouldn t expect to see  For functions that process and query data these could be prime opportunities for your application to cache  Slow-running functions   Where is the application spending most of its time  the best payoff in performance tuning is focusing on those parts of the application which consume the most time   Note  Xdebug  and in particular its profiling features  are very resource intensive and slow down PHP execution   It is recommended to not run these in a production server environment

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You want xdebug I think  Install it on the server  turn it on  pump the output through kcachegrind  for linux  or wincachegrind  for windows  and it ll show you a few pretty charts that detail the exact timings  counts and memory usage  but you ll need another extension for that    It rocks  seriously  D

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I would defiantly give BlackFire a try    There is this virtualBox I ve put together using puphpet  to test different php frameworks which coms with BlackFire  please feel free to fork and or distribute if required      https   github com webit4me PHPFrameworks

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If subtracting microtimes gives you negative results  try using the function with the argument true  microtime true    With true  the function returns a float instead of a string  as it does if it is called without arguments

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No extensions are needed  just use these two functions for simple profiling      Call this at each point of interest  passing a descriptive string function prof flag  str        global  prof timing   prof names       prof timing     microtime true        prof names      str        Call this when you re done and want to see the results function prof print         global  prof timing   prof names       size   count  prof timing       for  i 0  i lt  size - 1   i                  echo   lt b gt   prof names  i   lt  b gt  lt br gt            echo sprintf   amp nbsp  amp nbsp  amp nbsp  f lt br gt     prof timing  i 1 - prof timing  i              echo   lt b gt   prof names  size-1   lt  b gt  lt br gt        Here is an example  calling prof flag   with a description at each checkpoint  and prof print   at the end   prof flag  Start        include     lib database php      include     lib helper func php    prof flag  Connect to DB        connect to db     prof flag  Perform query           Get all the data      select query    SELECT   FROM data table       result   mysql query  select query    prof flag  Retrieve data         rows   array        found data false     while  r   mysql fetch assoc  result                found data true          rows      r        prof flag  Close DB        mysql close        close database connection  prof flag  Done    prof print      Output looks like this   Start nbsp  nbsp  nbsp 0 004303Connect to DB nbsp  nbsp  nbsp 0 003518Perform query nbsp  nbsp  nbsp 0 000308Retrieve data nbsp  nbsp  nbsp 0 000009Close DB nbsp  nbsp  nbsp 0 000049Done

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You all should definitely check this new php profiler   https   github com NoiseByNorthwest php-spx  It redefines the way of how php profilers collects and presents the result  Instead of outputting just a total number of particular function calls and total time spent of executing it - PHP-SPX presents the whole timeline of request execution in a perfectly readable way  Below is the screen of GUI it provides

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The PECL APD extension is used as follows    lt  php apd set pprof trace       rest of the script   gt    After  parse the generated file using pprofp   Example output   Trace for  home dan testapd php Total Elapsed Time   0 00 Total System Time    0 00 Total User Time      0 00   Real         User        System             secs     cumm  Time  excl cumm    excl cumm    excl cumm  Calls    call    s call  Memory Usage Name -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 100 0 0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00     1  0 0000   0 0009            0 main 56 9 0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00     1  0 0005   0 0005            0 apd set pprof trace 28 0 0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00    10  0 0000   0 0000            0 preg replace 14 3 0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00  0 00 0 00    10  0 0000   0 0000            0 str replace   Warning  the latest release of APD is dated 2004  the extension is no longer maintained and has various compability issues  see comments

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I like to use phpDebug for profiling  http   phpdebug sourceforge net www index html  It outputs all time   memory usage for any SQL used as well as all the included files  Obviously  it works best on code that s abstracted    For function and class profiling I ll just use microtime     get memory usage     get peak memory usage

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Poor man s profiling  no extensions required  Supports nested profiles and percent of total   function p open  flag        global  p times      if  null      p times           p times           if    array key exists  flag   p times            p times  flag       total    gt  0   open    gt  0         p times  flag   open     microtime true      function p close  flag        global  p times      if  isset  p times  flag   open                p times  flag   total       microtime true  -  p times  flag   open             unset  p times  flag   open              function p dump         global  p times       dump            sum    0      foreach   p times as  flag   gt   info             dump  flag   elapsed      info  total             sum     info  total              foreach   dump as  flag   gt   info             dump  flag   percent      dump  flag   elapsed    sum            return  dump      Example    lt  php  p open  foo    sleep 1   p open  bar    sleep 2   p open  baz    sleep 3   p close  baz    sleep 2   p close  bar    sleep 1   p close  foo     var dump p dump       Yields   array 3      foo    gt  array 2        elapsed    gt  9 000766992569      percent    gt  0 4736904954747        bar    gt  array 2        elapsed    gt  7 0004580020905      percent    gt  0 36841864946596        baz    gt  array 2        elapsed    gt  3 0001420974731      percent    gt  0 15789085505934

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XDebug is not stable and it s not always available for particular php version  For example on some servers I still run php-5 1 6  -- it s what comes with RedHat RHEL5  and btw still receives updates for all important issues   and recent XDebug does not even compile with this php  So I ended up with switching to DBG debugger Its php benchmarking provides timing for functions  methods  modules and even lines

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For benchmarking  like in your example  I use the pear Benchmark package  You set markers for measuring  The class also provides a few presentation helpers  or you can process the data as you see fit   I actually have it wrapped in another class with a   destruct method  When a script exits  the output is logged via log4php to syslog  so I have a lot of performance data to work from

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PECL XHPROF looks interensting too  It has clickable HTML interface for viewing reports and pretty straightforward documentation  I have yet to test it though

[php] Simplest way to profile a PHP script

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