Profiling PHP Applications with XHProf

Ri Xu

8 years ago

Introduction

XHProf is a function-level hierarchical profiler for PHP and has a simple HTML based navigational interface. The raw data collection component is implemented in C (as a PHP extension).

Install XHProf on OS X

$ brew install php56-xhprof

For example, profiling fibonacci.php:

<?php

xhprof_enable(XHPROF_FLAGS_CPU + XHPROF_FLAGS_MEMORY);
$XHPROF_ROOT = realpath(dirname(__FILE__) .'/..');
include_once $XHPROF_ROOT . "/xhprof-0.9.4/xhprof-0.9.4/xhprof_lib/utils/xhprof_lib.php";
include_once $XHPROF_ROOT . "/xhprof-0.9.4/xhprof-0.9.4/xhprof_lib/utils/xhprof_runs.php";
$xhprof_runs = new XHProfRuns_Default();

function printFibonacci($n) {
    $first  = 0;
    $second = 1;
    echo "Fibonacci Series \n";
    echo $first . ' ' . $second . ' ';
    for ($i = 2; $i < $n; $i++) {
        $third  = $first + $second;
        echo $third . ' ';
        $first  = $second;
        $second = $third;
    }
}

// Function call to print Fibonacci series upto 30 numbers.
printFibonacci(30);

$xhprof_data = xhprof_disable();
$run_id      = $xhprof_runs->save_run($xhprof_data, "xhprof_foo");
echo '<a href="<xhprof-ui-address>/xhprof_html/index.php?run='.$run_id.'&source=xhprof_foo" target="_blank">count</a>';

Viewing Callgraphs

Generation of callgraphs required graphviz utility installed.

Use XHprof and PHP on Windows

Download old version releases of PHP from archives and download XHprof for Windows from windows.php.net.

Edit php.ini:

[xhprof]
extension = ./ext/php_xhprof.dll
xhprof.output_dir = ./dev