Tag: xhprof

I'm doing some performance tuning on a project at the moment and my favourite tool is still XHGui - but it's designed to run on the same machine as its victim and since this is a vagrant VM, the chances of me destroying the machine and therefore the data are pretty high! Instead, I set it up to store the data onto the host and I thought I'd share how I did that.

There's a new version of XHGui (well, a few months old) and it's fabulous! It's got a few new dependencies though so I thought I'd write down how I set up my version, in case it's helpful to anyone else (and so I feel like a pro next time I have to do this!). If you're not familiar with XHGui it's a fabulously easy and friendly way to profile your application; to understand which method calls in a page take the time and how many times they are made, so you can improve the performance of your application. All these instructions are for my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.10 system, hopefully they will work for you or you'll be able to adapt them as appropriate.

This post is mostly about a tutorial I will be delivering at PHPNW on October 5th in Manchester, UK, and why I think a tutorial that contains no PHP belongs at a PHP conference

In October, I'll be delivering a tutorial at the mighty PHPNW Conference which contains very little PHP. Why? Because I think, as developers, it's our other professional skills that suffer. As a consultant, I work with lots of different teams, and it is very rare for code to be the problem (and the one time it was, it wasn't the only problem!).

In web development, our biggest challenges are not writing code, we can do that. But getting the code safely from one place to another, with many people's work preserved, having our platform(s) correctly configured and understanding how to use them, making use of the tools in the ecosystem which will help us improve the quality of our code; these are the big challenges we face, and that's why I proposed this workshop and why I think all these topics are important.

I had a frustrating bug the other day with a new XHGUI install, I am working on creating a VM for my new PHP tools course I am teaching in March and I wanted to pre-install and part-install a bunch of things so that I can show some great tools in a limited amount of time. My XHGUI wasn't quite right though; it couldn't generate the callgraph for me. Instead, it said: