Simplest way to profile a PHP script

php profiling
Mark Biek picture Mark Biek · Aug 21, 2008 · Viewed 189.5k times · Source

What's the easiest way to profile a PHP script?

I'd love tacking something on that shows me a dump of all function calls and how long they took but I'm also OK with putting something around specific functions.

I tried experimenting with the microtime function:

$then = microtime();
myFunc();
$now = microtime();

echo sprintf("Elapsed:  %f", $now-$then);

but that sometimes gives me negative results. Plus it's a lot of trouble to sprinkle that all over my code.

Answer

mercutio picture mercutio · Aug 21, 2008

You want xdebug I think. Install it on the server, turn it on, pump the output through kcachegrind (for linux) or wincachegrind (for windows) and it'll show you a few pretty charts that detail the exact timings, counts and memory usage (but you'll need another extension for that).

It rocks, seriously :D

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