WebGrind: web-based frontend for XDebug PHP profiling
Webgrind is a web-based Xdebug profiling frontend for PHP similar to kcachegrind. Webgrind provides a simple PHP-powered interface for examining the output of XDebug’s profiling reports, for a quick and simply overview of the performance costs in various areas of your PHP application.
One of the authors, Joakim Nygard, has posted a brief summary of the project, noting it was designed to be a simple drop-in-place script to allow relatively hassle-free profiling, especially owing to the lack of PHP profiling tools on OS X. Webgrind provides a usable report on functions, methods, file includes and more.
XDebug is a debugging platform for PHP implemented as a PHP extension. XDebug can watch the execution of a PHP script, then generate a profile information report. The profile info file can then be opened with KCacheGrind. The profiling report includes calls to and time spent within functions, which functions are calling a given function and the overall cost of a procedure as part of the total script execution time. WebGrind is simply an alternative to KCacheGrind for examining the output report.
The output isn’t as detailed as a desktop based debugging and profiling system, such as the plugin for Eclipse PDT / Zend Studio for Eclipse. On the other hand, installation is as simple as dropping a PHP script into the webroot and loading it up in a browser. Since its release, Webgrind has had a number of updates from the authors, including the current 0.7 release which offers version checking and support for loading a specific report.
The Google Summer of Code project has a similar project lined up for summer 2008, which Chung-Yang Lee has applied for.
See the Google Code page for more details.
