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.

Answer 1

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() + getmemoryusage() + getpeakmemory_usage().

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

The PECL APD extension is very easy to use and gives nice results. http://www.php.net/apd

<?php
apd_set_pprof_trace();

//rest of the script
?>

All you need to do afterward is to 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

Answer 4

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.