A Week of Blackfire 3

While the Blackfire team is putting the final touches on some nice features that I’m going to talk about very soon now, we made some small but interesting changes to Blackfire last week.

New Companion Feedback Bar

When profiling from a browser via the Blackfire Chrome extension, you get a nice “View profile” link that gets you to the profiling results when profiling is done. As of version 0.7.0+ of the Companion, the main costs are also displayed in the toolbar to give you some fast feedback about the current profile.

Click on any dimensions to drill down into the call graph.

Documentation: A new first-time-user Tutorial

If you feel a bit lost when looking at your first profile on Blackfire.io, we now got you covered with a new tutorial that helps you understand how to read and analyze your very first profile.

UI Simplification (again)

Last week, we removed almost all options from the call graph UI. This week, we’ve also removed the select box that allowed you to change the dimension you want to focus on. Be reassured, you can still change the dimension by clicking on the toolbar icons. Having two ways to do the same thing is never a good idea, and that’s fixed now. It’s also more consistent with the new Companion Feedback Bar as clicking on the icons is how you can get more information about any dimension.

Profile Next Request Removal

Another simplification is the removal of the “Profile next request” in the Companion (as of 0.7.2+). Even if some people were using it, it did not work very well and some “next” requests were almost impossible to profile that way. So, we decided to remove this option and we are thinking about how to eventually reintroduce it with a better interface. In the meantime, it’s much easier and convenient to profile such requests via the blackfire curl command line utility (and don’t forget that you can use the “Copy as cURL” link feature from Chrome or Firefox).

Happy profiling!