New: Profiling with the Debug Add-on

By Christophe Dujarric, on Sep 16, 2019

Blackfire is built for code performance optimization. Hooking deep into PHP, it enables developers to know exactly which code is executed, when, and how much resources it consumes. This opens doors to more than performance optimization: debugging.

The initial purpose of Blackfire required some choices for the technical implementation of profiling. We built a lightweight profiler, which enables developers to focus fast on what really matters in terms of performance, and guarantees optimal privacy.

This required to:

  • Prune (remove from the profile’s data) all function/method calls responsible for less than 1% of the overall consumption metrics. That would remove all unnecessary noise on callgraphs;
  • Anonymize SQL queries by not sending any parameter to our servers.

But the data we remove for profiling and privacy are potentially highly valuable when in a debug session. The Debug Add-on is built to let developers disable pruning and anonymization for specific requests!

The add-on can be subscribed to with any paid plan.

Read more about the add-on in the following two articles:

Happy profiling and debugging,

Christophe Dujarric

Christophe is the Chief Product Officer at Blackfire. He's an engineer, but probably one of the least "tech" people in the company. He's wearing many hats, from product management to marketing and sales. He loves the beauty of simple solutions that solve actual problems.