XHProf UI

This is a graphical front end designed to store and present the profiling information provided by the Facebook created XHProf profiling tool.

Related Tools

• XHGui - Uses MongoDB as a backend (rather than MySQL)
• XHProf.io - Uses MySQL backend, more normalized storage schema

Project Includes

• It includes a header.php document you can use with PHP's auto_prepend_file directive. It sets up profiling by initilizing a few variables, and settting register_shutdown_function with the footer. Once started profiles are done when requested (?_profile=1), or randomly. Profiled pages display a link to their profile results at the bottom of the page (this can be disabled on a blacklist based for specific documents. e.g. pages generating XML, images, etc.).
• For tips on including header.php on an nginx + php-fpm install take a look at: http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2012/04/23/php-fpm-nginx-php_value-and-multiple-values/
• The GUI is a bit prettier (Thanks to Graham Slater)
• It uses a MySQL backend, the database schema is stored in xhprof_runs.php
• There's a frontend to view different runs, compare runs to the same url, etc.

Key Features

• Listing 25, 50 most recent runs
• Display most expensive (cpu), longest running, or highest memory usage runs for the day
• It introduces the concept of "Similar" URLs. Consider:
  • http://news.example.com/?story=23
  • http://news.example.com/?story=25 While the URLs are different, the PHP code execution path is likely identical, by tweaking the method in xhprof_runs.php you can help the frontend be aware that these urls are identical.
• Highcharts is used to graph stats over requests for an easy heads up display.

Requirements

Besides a simple PHP running on your favourite web server you will also need following packages:

• php5-xhprof
• php5-mysql
• graphviz (uses dot to generate callgraphs)

Installation

• Install your favourite mix of PHP and web server
• Install MySQL server
• Clone the project to some folder
• Map the sub folder xhprof_html to be accessible over HTTP
• Move xhprof_lib/config.sample.php to xhprof_lib/config.php
• Edit xhprof_lib/config.php
• Update the SQL server configuration
• Update the URL of the service (should point to xhprof_html over HTTP)
• Update the dot_binary configuration - otherwise no call graphs!
• Update the controlIPs variable to enable access.
• For a development machine you can set this to false to disable IP checks.
• Import the DB schema (it is just 1 table)
• See the SQL at xhprof_runs.php
• Add a PHP configuration to enable the profiling
• If using Apache you can edit your virtual host configuration
• Add php_admin_value auto_prepend_file "/path/to/xhprof/external/header.php"
• Visit http://your-server/xhprof/xhprof_html/ and be amazed!
• To get profiler information showing up there visit your page with a GET variable _profile=1.
• For example http://localhost/?_profile=1

We Are Working On

• The aggregation functionality is ignored completely
• The code is... a mess. Deadlines do that to you, we're working on it
• The default table schema isn't indexed all the places it needs to be
• Easier ways to diff URLs