debugging long running PHP script

Question

I have php script running as a cron job, extensively using third party code. Script itself has a few thousands LOC. Basically it\'s the data import / treatment script. (JSON to

Answer 1

Profiling tool:

There is a PHP profiling tool called Blackfire which is currently in public beta. There is specific documentation on how to profile CLI applications. Once you collected the profile you can analyze the application control flow with time measurements in a nice UI:

Memory consumption suspicious:

Memory seems not to be a problem, usage growing as it should, without unexpected peaks.

A growing memory usage actually sounds suspicious! If the current dataset does not depend on all previous datasets of the import, then a growing memory most probably means, that all imported datasets are kept in memory, which is bad. PHP may also frequently try to garbage collect, just to find out that there is nothing to remove from memory. Especially long running CLI tasks are affected, so be sure to read the blog post that discovered the behavior.