Excimer

Excimer is a PHP 7.1+ extension that provides an interrupting timer and a low-overhead sampling profiler.

Debian
See packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com

PECL
See our PECL entry.

Source
Download the source code into an appropriate directory from git:

Or and unpack.

Build
Excimer requires Linux.

Below   is the directory that excimer Git repository was cloned to.

Then add  to the PHP configuration in an appropriate place. For example, in modern Debian-derived distributions you'd add a file to  (where   is the version of PHP for which you compiled Excimer) and use the   command to enable it.

Background
We found that just enabling Tideways XHProf on a server with PHP 7.2 caused a performance degradation of about 4%. We believe this is due to it installing a  hook, which intercepts all function calls in PHP. Even though this hook does nothing by default, just having it causes PHP's VM to omit certain optimisations. The hook can only be installed globally, and it is not possible to enable it just for a particular request.

Excimer does not install any  hook. This means it cannot count function calls, but makes it suitable for production-wide installation.

Reference documentation
For now, please see the function stubs in the extension source.

Use a one-shot timer to limit the execution time of a function
When the timer expires, Excimer sets a flag which is then checked by the PHP VM every time a function returns, and on every loop iteration. For CPU-intensive tasks, this is usually often enough. However, it will not interrupt long-running C functions such as MySQL connection attempts.

When the exception is thrown, the backtrace will show the callback being called from the interrupted code.

Note that the  variable must be kept alive, for example by keeping it in scope. If the timer object is destroyed, the timer will stop and the callback will not be called.

Use a periodic timer to gather time-series memory usage statistics
The process will be interrupted once every 100ms, and the current memory usage logged to a file.

Profile a process and produce a flame graph
In this example, FlameGraph is presumed to be installed at. An SVG file is written to. An example of the typical output can be seen at https://tstarling.com/stuff/excimer-flamegraph.svg.

Profile a process and produce a function table
In this example, event counts are aggregated by function name, formatted in a fixed-width table, and written to a file. An example of typical output can be seen at https://tstarling.com/stuff/excimer-aggregated.txt.

Maintainer notes
For information about how to update the PECL release, see how to PECL.