SPX, which stands for Simple Profiling eXtension, is just another profiling extension for PHP.
It differentiates itself from other similar extensions as being:
- totally free and confined to your infrastructure (i.e. no data leaks to a SaaS).
- very simple to use: just set an environment variable (command line) or switch on a radio button (web page) to profile your script. Thus, you are free of:
- manually instrumenting your code (Ctrl-C a long running command line script is even supported).
- using a dedicated browser extension or command line launcher.
- multi metrics capable: 21 currently supported (various time metrics, memory, included files, objects in use, I/O…).
- able to collect data without losing context. For example Xhprof (and potentially its forks) aggregates data per caller / callee pairs, which implies the loss of the full call stack and forbids timeline or Flamegraph based analysis.
- shipped with its web UI which allows to:
- enable / configure profiling for the current browser session
- list profiled script reports
- select a report for in-depth analysis, featuring these interactive visualizations:
- timeline (scale to millions of function calls)
- flat profile
- Flamegraph