PhpPerfTools/GUI

A graphical interface for XHProf data.

This tool requires that XHProf or its one of its forks Uprofiler, Tideways are installed. XHProf is a PHP Extension that records and provides profiling data. PhpPerfTools/GUI (this tool) takes that information and provides a convenient GUI for working with it.

System Requirements

PhpPerfTools/GUI has the following requirements:

• PHP version 5.3 or later.
• Mongo based installation:
  • MongoDB Extension MongoDB PHP driver. PhpPerfTools/GUI requires verison 1.3.0 or later.
  • MongoDB MongoDB Itself. PhpPerfTools/GUI requires version 2.2.0 or later.
• PDO based installation:
  • PDO extension.
  • One of the sql servers: MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL. It will also work with SQLite.
• For upload config:
  • CURL extension.
  • Proper network/firewall rules: GUI instance and Collector instance must see each other.
• One of XHProf, Uprofiler or Tideways to actually profile the data.
• dom If you are running the tests you'll need the DOM extension (which is a dependency of PHPUnit).

Installation from source

1. Clone or download PhpPerfTools/GUI from GitHub.

2. Point your webserver to the public directory.

3. Set the permissions on the cache directory to allow the webserver to create files. If you're lazy, 0777 will work.

   The following command changes the permissions for the cache directory:

   chmod -R 0777 cache

4. Set up your webserver. The Configuration section below describes how to setup the rewrite rules for both nginx and apache.

MongoDB storage

1. Start a MongoDB instance.

2. If your MongoDB setup uses authentication, or isn't running on the default port and localhost, update PhpPerfTools/GUI's config/config.php so that PhpPerfTools/GUI can connect to your mongod instance.

3. (Optional, but recommended) Add indexes to MongoDB to improve performance.

   PhpPerfTools/GUI stores profiling information in a results collection in the xhprof database in MongoDB. Adding indexes improves performance, letting you navigate pages more quickly.

   To add an index, open a mongo shell from your command prompt. Then, use MongoDB's db.collection.ensureIndex() method to add the indexes, as in the following:

   $ mongo
   > use xhprof
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'meta.SERVER.REQUEST_TIME' : -1 } )
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().wt' : -1 } )
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().mu' : -1 } )
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().cpu' : -1 } )
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'meta.url' : 1 } )
   > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'meta.simple_url' : 1 } )
   

Limiting MongoDB Disk Usage

Disk usage can grow quickly, especially when profiling applications with large code bases or that use larger frameworks.

To keep the growth in check, configure MongoDB to automatically delete profiling documents once they have reached a certain age by creating a TTL index.

Decide on a maximum profile document age in seconds: you may wish to choose a lower value in development (where you profile everything), than production (where you profile only a selection of documents). The following command instructs Mongo to delete documents over 5 days (432000 seconds) old.

$ mongo
> use xhprof
> db.results.ensureIndex( { "meta.request_ts" : 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds : 432000 } )

PDO Storage

Schema

Schema files are in root directory of GUI. Import schema into database and configure storage handler.

Configuration

array(
    'id' => 'sqlite-test',
    'name' => 'Test sqlite instance',
    'type' => 'pdo',

    'dsn' => 'sqlite:../test.sqlite',
    'user' => 'user',
    'password' => 'password'
),

Configuration

Configure Webserver Re-Write Rules

PhpPerfTools/GUI prefers to have URL rewriting enabled, but will work without it. For Apache, you can do the following to enable URL rewriting:

1. Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed and that AllowOverride has the directive FileInfo set for the correct DocumentRoot.

   Example configuration for Apache 2.4:

   <Directory /var/www/gui/>
       Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride FileInfo
       Require all granted
   </Directory>

2. Make sure you are loading up mod_rewrite correctly. You should see something like:

   LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

3. PhpPerfTools/GUI comes with a .htaccess file to enable the remaining rewrite rules.

For nginx and fast-cgi, you can the following snippet as a start:

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name example.com;

    # root directive should be global
    root   /var/www/example.com/public/gui/public/;
    index  index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

Configure PhpPerfTools/GUI Profiling Rate

After installing PhpPerfTools/GUI, you may want to do change how frequently you profile the host application. The profiler_enable configuration option allows you to provide a callback function that specifies the requests that are profiled. By default, PhpPerfTools/GUI profiles 1 in 100 requests.

The following example configures PhpPerfTools/GUI to only profile requests from a specific URL path:

The following example configures PhpPerfTools/GUI to profile 1 in 100 requests, excluding requests with the /blog URL path:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profiler_enable' => function() {
        $url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        if (strpos($url, '/blog') === 0) {
            return false;
        }
        return rand(1, 100) === 42;
    }
);

In contrast, the following example configured PhpPerfTools/GUI to profile every request:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profiler_enable' => function() {
        return true;
    }
);

Configure 'Simple' URLs Creation

PhpPerfTools/GUI generates 'simple' URLs for each profile collected. These URLs are used to generate the aggregate data used on the URL view. Since different applications have different requirements for how URLs map to logical blocks of code, the profile.simple_url configuration option allows you to provide specify the logic used to generate the simple URL. By default, all numeric values in the query string are removed.

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profile.simple_url' => function($url) {
        // Your code goes here.
    }
);

The URL argument is the REQUEST_URI or argv value.

Configure ignored functions

You can use the profiler_options configuration value to set additional options for the profiler extension. This is useful when you want to exclude specific functions from your profiler data:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    //Other config
    'profiler_options' => [
        'ignored_functions' => ['call_user_func', 'call_user_func_array']
    ]
);

Profiling a Web Request or CLI script

Using collector you can collect data from your web applications and CLI scripts. This data is then pushed into PhpPerfTools/GUI's database where it can be viewed with this application.

Waterfall Display

The goal of PhpPerfTools/GUI's waterfall display is to recognize that concurrent requests can affect each other. Concurrent database requests, CPU-intensive activities and even locks on session files can become relevant. With an Ajax-heavy application, understanding the page build is far more complex than a single load: hopefully the waterfall can help. Remember, if you're only profiling a sample of requests, the waterfall fills you with impolite lies.

Using Tideways Extension

The XHProf PHP extension is not compatible with PHP7.0+. Instead you'll need to use the tideways_xhprof extension.

Once installed, you can use the following configuration data:

[tideways_xhprof]
extension="/path/to/tideways/tideways_xhprof.so"

License

Original code Copyright 2013 Mark Story & Paul Reinheimer Changes Copyright Grzegorz Drozd

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.