Is there a way to programmatically extract and compare details from profiles

[nickchomey]

One thing that I'd like to do is evaluate how various functions perform over time, across different pages. Is there a way to programmatically parse/extract/compare profiles - either a "diff" of the entire profile or just specific functions?

If so, I would turn on SPX, crawl the pages, turn off SPX and then run a script to extract and compare the stats to a previous set.

Thanks!

[NoiseByNorthwest]

You can indeed extract structured profile data from profile files.

These files contain compressed plain text in the following format:

[events]
0 1 0 0
0 0 80291 8608
1 1 101977 8480
2 1 103595 8480
2 0 104346 8528
0 1 105680 8544
0 0 192153 19912
3 1 197900 19288
...
[functions]
::zend_compile_file
/var/www/sf_app/public/index.php
dirname
/var/www/sf_app/config/bootstrap.php
/var/www/sf_app/vendor/autoload.php
/var/www/sf_app/vendor/composer/autoload_real.php
...

In the [events] section, records follow this format: <function id> <event type> <metric 1> <metric 2>....

Where:

• function id refers to the index of the corresponding function name in the [functions] section.
• event type is 1 for the start of a function call, and 0 for the end of a function call.
• metric 1 typically represents the wall time (in nanoseconds).
• metric 2 typically represents the memory usage (in bytes).

[nickchomey]

Thanks! It sounds like it would be fairly complicated to parse all of that and extract what I need. Though, after a quick browse of the javascript code, it looks like I should be able to use some of the functions as a basis to achieve what I'm looking for. I'll play around with it and share it if there's anything worthwhile.

[andrew-demb]

@NoiseByNorthwest is it common format? Maybe there are existent solutions to compare results (I know some for pprof)

[NoiseByNorthwest]

@andrew-demb I don't know, it may be accidentally close to an existing format, but in the realm of profiling I don't know.
I'll however add interoperability features (such as callgrind export) in 0.5 version.

[NoiseByNorthwest]

Beware that the record format of the [events] section will change in the future v0.5 version.