I'll admit it, I'm doing performance-intensive code in PHP. I started my career writing demos in hand-coded assembler, but the need for development speed has pushed me towards using a scripting language. Part of making fast progress is reducing dependencies, which has meant sticking with PHP for the whole system, even for back-end analysis where another language might be more expected.

That's left me desperate to get more information on where the time is going when things slow down. My first weapon of choice is a simple pair of timing functions that I wrap around code to tell how long a whole block is taking. That's quick and easy, (and I've included my code below) but it doesn't give you any information about which parts of it are taking all the time.

For that you need a profiler, and if you do a search for php profiling, almost every result talks about XDebug. Unfortunately, as a profiler, it's a great debugger. You need to edit php.ini and restart the server, or pass in a URL input, you can only profile an entire script rather than just portions, and once you have generated the file you need to transfer them to one of several klunky desktop applications to explore the results.

After abandoning XDebug as too unwieldy, I spent some time searching for other solutions. I finally came across XHProf, and I'm loving it. It was developed as an internal tool for Facebook and open-sourced in March, and you can tell it's been written by people who actually use it. It took a little bit of fiddling to install it, I couldn't get it going through PECL and ended up downloading the source and manually compiling. It was a dream to use after that. It let me trigger the profling programatically around the code I cared about, and then browse the results through a web interface.

There's a couple of caveats, it's missing a few advanced features I'm used to from advanced desktop profilers like detailed information on the full call stack for functions rather than the immediate parents and timing for individual lines of code rather than functions, but in practice it's got all the features I need to diagnose performance problems. I was able to speed up my IMAP email importing dramatically, largely by removing the use of a global variable in an inner loop, it turned out to be far faster to pass the object as a function argument! That's the sort of problem that would have taken me far longer to find without XHProf.

Here's the primitive timing functions I mentioned at the start:

$g_start_time = 0;
$g_end_time = 0;

    if ($dolog)
    {
        $durationstring = 'pete_timer: %01.4f sec';
        error_log(sprintf($durationstring, $duration));
    }
   
    return $duration;
}