xhgui

A graphical interface for XHProf data built on MongoDB.

This tool requires that XHProf or its one of its forks Uprofiler, Tideways are installed. XHProf is a PHP Extension that records and provides profiling data. XHGui (this tool) takes that information, saves it in MongoDB, and provides a convenient GUI for working with it.

System Requirements

XHGui has the following requirements:

• PHP version 5.5 or later.
• XHProf, Uprofiler or Tideways to actually profile the data.
• MongoDB Extension MongoDB PHP driver. XHGui requires verison 1.3.0 or later.
• MongoDB MongoDB Itself. XHGui requires version 2.2.0 or later.
• mcrypt PHP must be configured with mcrypt (which is a dependency of Slim).
• dom If you are running the tests you'll need the DOM extension (which is a dependency of PHPUnit).

Installation

1. Clone or download xhgui from Github.

2. Point your webserver to the webroot directory.

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

   The following command changes the permissions for the cache directory:

   chmod -R 0777 cache
   

4. Start a MongoDB instance. XHGui uses the MongoDB instance to store profiling data.

5. If your MongoDB setup uses authentication, or isn't running on the default port and localhost, update XHGui's config/config.php so that XHGui can connect to your mongod instance.

6. (Optional, but recommended) Add indexes to MongoDB to improve performance.

   XHGui stores profiling information in a results collection in the xhprof database in MongoDB. Adding indexes improves performance, letting you navigate pages more quickly.

   To add an index, open a mongo shell from your command prompt. Then, use MongoDB's db.collection.ensureIndex() method to add the indexes, as in the following:

   $ 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 } )
   

7. Run XHGui's install script. The install script downloads composer and uses it to install the XHGui's dependencies.

   cd path/to/xhgui
   php install.php
   

8. Set up your webserver. The Configuration section below describes how to setup the rewrite rules for both nginx and 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 has the directive FileInfo set for the correct DocumentRoot.

   Example configuration for Apache 2.4:

   <Directory /var/www/xhgui/>
       Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride FileInfo
       Require all granted
   </Directory>
   

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 file to enable the remaining rewrite rules.

For nginx and 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 specifies the requests that are profiled. By default, XHGui profiles 1 in 100 requests.

The following example configures XHGui to only profile requests from a specific URL path:

The following example configures XHGui to profile 1 in 100 requests, excluding requests with the /blog URL path:

// In config/config.php
return array(
    // Other config
    'profiler.enable' => function() {
        $url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        if (strpos($url, '/blog') === 0) {
            return false;
        }
        return rand(1, 100) === 42;
    }
);

In contrast, the following example configured XHGui to profile every request:

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

Configure 'Simple' URLs Creation

XHGui generates 'simple' URLs for each profile collected. These 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, the profile.simple_url configuration option allows you to provide specify the logic used to generate the simple URL. By default, all numeric values in the query string are removed.

// 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.

Profile an Application or Site

The simplest way to profile an application is to use external/header.php. external/header.php is designed to be combined with PHP's [auto_prepend_file](http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.auto-pr epend-file) directive. You can enable auto_prepend_file 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";
}

Profile a CLI Script

The simplest way to profile a CLI is to use external/header.php. external/header.php is designed to be combined with PHP's auto_prepend_file directive. You can enable auto_prepend_file 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.

You can alternatively use the -d flag when running php:

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 to a temporary file for a later import to XHGui's MongoDB database.

To configure XHGui to save your data to a temporary file, change the save.handler setting to file and define your file's path with save.handler.filename.

To import a saved file to MongoDB use XHGui's provided external/import.php script.

Be aware of file locking: depending on your workload, you may need to change the save.handler.filename file path to avoid file locking during the import.

The following demonstrate the use of external/import.php:

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

Warning: Importing the same file twice will load twice the run datas inside MongoDB, resulting in duplicate profiles

Limiting MongoDB Disk Usage

Disk usage can grow quickly, especially when profiling applications with large code bases or that use larger frameworks.

To keep the growth in check, configure MongoDB to automatically delete profiling documents once they have reached a certain age by creating a TTL index.

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 XHGui's waterfall display is to recognize that concurrent requests can affect each other. Concurrent database requests, CPU-intensive activities and even locks on session files can become relevant. With an Ajax-heavy application, 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.
• The waterfall display introduces storage of a new request_ts_micro value, as second level granularity doesn't work well with waterfalls.
• The waterfall display is still very much in alpha.
• Feedback and pull requests are 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.