XHProf PHP Profiler Full Usage Example

After installing XHProf as instructed here, this is how you'd go about actually using it:

create a directory called xhprof under your home directory:

mkdir ~/xhprof

change ownership of the created directory to avoid permission problems:

sudo chown www-data xhprof/ -R

add this to your php.ini config file:

xhprof.output_dir="/home/<your_username>/xhprof"

where <your_username> is your linux username. This will be the directory where the reports will be saved.

now download this which is the actual project.

unzip the downloaded file

unzip facebook-xhprof-270b75d.zip

rename it to "xhprof".

mv facebook-xhprof-270b75d xhprof

now move the directory to your web root:

sudo mv xhprof/ /var/www

cd to your web root:

cd /var/www

change ownership of the xhprof directory to avoid permission problems:

sudo chown www-data xhprof/ -R 

Now we are going to create the script to profile; we are going to profile the running of a for loop with some code inside; you can create the script anywhere; I'm going to create it at localhost/test/index.php:

<?php
    $XHPROF_ROOT = "/var/www/xhprof";
    include_once $XHPROF_ROOT . "/xhprof_lib/utils/xhprof_lib.php";
    include_once $XHPROF_ROOT . "/xhprof_lib/utils/xhprof_runs.php";
    // start profiling
    xhprof_enable();
    for ($index = 0; $index < 1000; $index++) {
        $x = array(1,2,3,4);
        array_reverse($x);
     }
    //end profiling 
    $xhprof_data = xhprof_disable();
    $xhprof_runs = new XHProfRuns_Default();
    $run_id = $xhprof_runs->save_run($xhprof_data, "foobar");
?>

open that script in your browser to run it.

you should see a blank screen if you had no errors.

now cd to the directory we have created to store the created reports and list the contents:

cd ~/xhprof; ls;

you will probably see something like this: 5019d4829b80b.foobar.xhprof.

That's the report created by XHProf. To look at the results, we will open the following url on a browser:

http://localhost/xhprof/xhprof_html/index.php?run=5019d4829b80b&source=foobar

now the value for the run parameter on the url will be the the timestamp that you saw when you listed the contents of the report directory.