xhgui

A graphical interface for XHProf data built on MongoDB.

This tool requires that XHProf or its fork Uprofiler is installed, which is a PHP Extension that records and provides profiling data. XHGui (this tool) takes that information, saves it in MongoDB, and provides a convienent GUI for working with it.

System Requirements

• XHProf or Uprofiler to actually profile the data
• MongoDB PHP MongoDB PHP extension
• MongoDB MongoDB Itself
• [mcrypt] (http://php.net/manual/en/book.mcrypt.php) PHP must be configured with mcrypt (which is a dependency of Slim)
• [dom] (http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php) If you are running the tests you'll need the DOM extension (which is a dependency of PHPUnit)

Installation

Installing Xhgui requires 2 main steps. First is installing the xhgui front-end, and the second is profiling a web application/site.

Installing Xhgui

• Clone or download xhgui from github.

• You'll need to install mongodb, and php-mongodb, at least version 1.3.0 of the php extension is required.

• Point your webserver to the webroot directory.

• Set the permissions on the cache cache directory to allow the webserver to create files. If you're lazy 0777 will work. Run:

  chmod -R 0777 cache
  

• If your mongodb setup requires a username + password, or isn't running on the default port + host. You'll need to update config/config.php so that it can connect to mongod.

• You may wish to add indexes (recommended but optional) to improve the performance, you'll need to do this by using mongo console

  On your command prompt (irrespective of Windows or *nix), open mongo shell using command 'mongo' and follow below commands to add the index:

  $ mongo
  > use xhprof
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'meta.SERVER.REQUEST_TIME' : -1 } )
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().wt' : -1 } )
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().mu' : -1 } )
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().cpu' : -1 } )
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { 'meta.url' : 1 } )
  

  After adding indexes, you may notice you can navigate across pages faster.

• Run the install script. This will download composer and use it to install the dependencies for xhgui.

  cd path/to/xhgui
  php install.php
  

• Setup your webserver. See below for how to setup the rewrite rules for nginx + apache.

Configuration

Configure webserver re-write rules

Xhgui prefers to have URL rewriting enabled, but will work without it. For Apache you can do the following to enable URL rewriting:

1. Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed and that AllowOverride is set to All for the correct DocumentRoot.

2. Make sure you are loading up mod_rewrite correctly. You should see something like:

   LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
   

3. Xhgui comes with a .htaccess to enable the remaining rewrite rules.

For nginx & fast-cgi you can the following snippet as a start:

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name example.com;

    # root directive should be global
    root   /var/www/example.com/public/xhgui/webroot/;
    index  index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$uri&$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

Configure Xhgui profiling rate

After installing Xhgui you may want to do change how frequently you profile the host application. The profiler.enable configuration option allows you to provide a callback function that determines which requests are profiled. By default 1 in 100 requests are profiled. If for example you wanted to only profile requests in a certain URL path you could do the following:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profiler.enable' => function() {
        $url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        if (strpos($url, '/blog') === 0) {
            return false;
        }
        return rand(0, 100) === 42;
    }
);

The above code would profile anything not in /blog 1 in 100 requests. Paths containing /blog would never be profiled. To profile every request you could do the following:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profiler.enable' => function() {
        return true;
    }
);

Configure how 'simple' URLs are created

Xhgui generates 'simple' URLs for each profile collected. These simple URLs are used to generate the aggregate data used on the URL view. Since different applications have different requirements for how URLs map to logical blocks of code, a configuration option allows you to provide custom logic to generate the simple URL. By default all numeric values in the query string are removed. To provide custom logic you define the profiler.simple_url configuration option:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profile.simple_url' => function($url) {
        // Your code goes here.
    }
);

The URL argument is the REQUEST_URI or argv value.

Profiling an application / site

The simplest way to get an application profiled, is to use external/header.php. This file is designed to be combined with PHP's auto_prepend_file directive. This can be enabled system-wide through php.ini. Alternatively, you can enable auto_prepend_file per virtual host. With apache this would look like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    php_admin_value auto_prepend_file "/Users/markstory/Sites/xhgui/external/header.php"
    DocumentRoot "/Users/markstory/Sites/awesome-thing/app/webroot/"
    ServerName site.localhost
</VirtualHost>

With Nginx in fastcgi mode you could use:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name site.localhost;
    root /Users/markstory/Sites/awesome-thing/app/webroot/;
    fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE "auto_prepend_file=/Users/markstory/Sites/xhgui/external/header.php";
 }

Profiling a CLI script

The simplest way to get a CLI script profiled, is to use external/header.php. This file is designed to be combined with PHP's auto_prepend_file directive. This can be enabled system-wide through php.ini. Alternatively, you can enable include the header.php at the top of your script:

<?php
require '/path/to/xhgui/external/header.php';
// Rest of script.

Or use the -d flag:

php -d auto_prepend_file=/path/to/xhgui/external/header.php do_work.php

Saving & importing profiles

If your site cannot directly connect to your mongodb instance, you can choose to save your data on a temporary file for a later import to xhgui's mongo database. Change the save.handler setting to file and define your file's path with save.handler.filename. To import a file inside mongodb use the external/import.php. Be aware of file locking. Depending on your workload, you may need to change the save.handler.filename file path to avoid file locking

php external/import.php -f /path/to/file

Be careful, importing the same file twice will load twice the run datas inside mongo, resulting with duplicate profiles

Limiting Mongo Disk Usage

Disk usage can grow quickly, especially when profiling applications with large code bases, or that utilize larger frameworks. One technique to keep the growth in check is to have Mongo automatically delete profiling documents once they reach a certain age. Decide on a maximum profile document age in seconds, you may wish to choose a lower value in development (where you profile everything), than production (where you profile only a selection of documents). The following command instructs Mongo to delete documents over 5 days (432000 seconds) old.

  $ mongo
  > use xhprof
  > db.results.ensureIndex( { "meta.request_ts" : 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds : 432000 } )

Waterfall Display

The goal of the waterfall display is to recognize that concurrent requests can affect each other. Concurrent DB requests (or other resources), CPU intensive activies, or even locks on session files can become relevant. With an Ajax heavy applicaitons understanding the page build is far more complex than a single load, hopefully the waterfall can help. Remember: If you're only profiling a sample of requests the waterfall fills you with impolite lies.

Some Notes:

• There should probably be more indexes on MongoDB for this to be performant
• It introduces storage of a new request_ts_micro value, as second level granularity doesn't work well with waterfalls
• Still very much in alpha
• Feedback and pull requests welcome :)

Releases/Changelog

See the releases for changelogs, and release information.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Mark Story & Paul Reinheimer

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.