PHP Profiling

Overview

As of the 6.6.2 release, Sugar introduced the ability to profile via XHProf, which is an easy-to-use, hierarchical profiler for PHP. This allows developers to better manage and understand customer performance issues introduced by their customizations. This tool enables quick and accurate identification of the sources of performance sinks within the code by generating profiling logs. Profiling gives you the ability to see the call stack for the entire page load with timing details around function and method calls as well as statistics on call frequency.

Assuming XHProf is installed and enabled in your PHP configuration (which you can learn how to do in the PHP Manual), you can enable profiling in Sugar by adding the following parameters to the ./config_override.php file:

$sugar_config['xhprof_config']['enable'] = true;
$sugar_config['xhprof_config']['log_to'] = '{instance server path}/cache/xhprof';
// x where x is a number and 1/x requests are profiled. So to sample all requests set it to 1
$sugar_config['xhprof_config']['sample_rate'] = 1;
// array of function names to ignore from the profile (pass into xhprof_enable)
$sugar_config['xhprof_config']['ignored_functions'] = array();
// flags for xhprof
$sugar_config['xhprof_config']['flags'] = XHPROF_FLAGS_CPU + XHPROF_FLAGS_MEMORY;

Please note that with the above 'log_to' parameter, you would need to create the  ./cache/xhprof/ directory in your instance directory with proper permissions and ownership for the Apache user. You can also opt to leave the  xhprof_config.log_to parameter empty and set the logging path via the  xhprof.output_dir parameter in the  php.ini file.

Once the above parameters are set, XHProf profiling will log all output to the indicated directory and allow you to research any performance related issues encountered in the process of developing and maintaining the application.