A Week of Blackfire 1

By Fabien Potencier, on Dec 18, 2014

Earlier this week, we released a new version of Blackfire to ease the profiling of CLI scripts and HTTP requests; but the whole team was also busy doing many more smaller additions or changes.

Comparisons

The first interesting change has a big impact in terms of usability: the introduction of a simpler way to compare profiles. We care a lot about user experience and we hope you’ll love our two-click comparison on the “Profile Slots” page:

In the Graph view, we’ve also added a fast way to compare the current profile to another one:

Documentation

For some obscure reasons, Blackfire documentation was private until recently… probably because we were not very proud of it. Good news is that we rewrote the whole documentation to make everything clearer and easier to follow. We’ve also added a bunch of new tutorials and a brand new upgrade section. Last, but not the least, each command now has a copy button to make the installation process a snap.

Automatic Profile Titles

When profiling a Web page, if you don’t set a slot name yourself, Blackfire now automatically names your slot after the Web page title.

12 Factors Apps

12 factors apps fans will be happy to learn that all Blackfire settings for the Agent and the PHP Probe are now configurable via environment variables:

BLACKFIRE_AGENT_SOCKET='...' blackfire-agent ...

Probe Bug with Random Numbers

Blackfire is still in beta and even if the product is quite stable now, we still have some quirks; one of them was a bug in the PHP probe that made mt_rand() generate not so random numbers. This has been fixed now and we highly recommend everyone to upgrade to the latest version.

Happy profiling!

Fabien Potencier

Fabien Potencier is the CEO and founder of Blackfire.io. He founded the Symfony project in 2004 as he constantly looked for better ways to build websites. Fabien is also the creator of several other Open-Source projects, a writer, a blogger, a speaker at international conferences, and the happy father of two wonderful kids.