Profiling Code on Production

Question

I\'m toying around with the idea of implementing something that profiles code on the production server and wanted some best-practice advice. Obviously it\'s a bad idea to pr

Answer 1

Don't reinvent the wheel. XHProf Profiler is definitely the best tool for the job when it comes to profiling code within a production environment.

Your options for enabling profiling within xdebug are limited to either having profiling always on via a php.ini file or .htaccess file via xdebug.profiler_enable = 1 or selectively turning on profiling via xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 1. In the latter case you must have an XDEBUG_PROFILE GET or POST parameter set or send a cookie with the name XDEBUG_PROFILE. This means that should someone mischievous want to, they could slow your server to a crawl by simply appending that GET parameter to a bunch of requests.

The only option I could see that would profile a relatively random sample of requests is to have a cron script place an .htaccess file in the appropriate directory, periodically, and then move it out of the directory. Still, that is less than desirable.

If you do decide to go with XHProf take a look at XHGUI.

http://phpadvent.org/2010/profiling-with-xhgui-by-paul-reinheimer