March 10, 2015

Blackfire, PHP Profiling by SensioLabs

Blackfire is a new service by SensioLabs. It’s a web based utility to help benchmark your PHP applications. I’ve just sat down to give it a try. I’m blown away!

Installation was very simple via a Brew Keg (blackfireio/homebrew-blackfire) and I tested it with a Symfony Framework application using one of my custom commands.

The standard interface tracks a single test batch:

Blackfire

You have 10 slots to store test batches. This allows you to compare your benchmarks from one iteration to another, as shown below:

Blackfire

Hat’s off to the interface people - that’s some sweet work.

A incredible addition to the toolkit.

Also, take a look at this simple toggle for XDebug.