A Week of Blackfire 1
Besides the big announcements we have made in the last two weeks, the whole team has been hard at work to tweak the platform to make it more flexible.
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!
