Введение

APD is the Advanced PHP Debugger. It was written to provide profiling and debugging capabilities for PHP code, as well as to provide the ability to print out a full stack backtrace. APD supports interactive debugging, but by default it writes data to trace files. It also offers event based logging so that varying levels of information (including function calls, arguments passed, timings, etc.) can be turned on or off for individual scripts.

Предостережение

APD is a Zend Extension, modifying the way the internals of PHP handle function calls, and thus may or may not be compatible with other Zend Extensions (for example Zend Optimizer).

Установка

APD is currently available as a PECL extension from http://pecl.php.net/package/apd. Make sure you have installed the CGI version of PHP and it is available in your current path along with the phpize script.

Run the following command to download, build, and install the latest stable version of APD:
pear install apd

This automatically installs the APD Zend module into your PHP extensions directory. It is not mandatory to keep it there; you can store the module in any directory PHP can read as long as you set the zend_extension parameter accordingly.

Windows users can download the extension dll php_apd.dll from http://snaps.php.net/win32/PECL_STABLE/.

In your INI file, add the following lines:

zend_extension = /absolute/path/to/apd.so apd.dumpdir = /absolute/path/to/trace/directory apd.statement_tracing = 0

Depending on your PHP build, the zend_extension directive can be one of the following:

zend_extension (non ZTS, non debug build) zend_extension_ts ( ZTS, non debug build) zend_extension_debug (non ZTS, debug build) zend_extension_debug_ts ( ZTS, debug build)

Building on Win32

To build APD under Windows you need a working PHP compilation environment as described on http://php.net/ -- basically, it requires you to have Microsoft Visual C++, win32build.zip, bison/flex, and some know how to get it to work. Also ensure that adp.dsp has DOS line endings; if it has unix line endings, Microsoft Visual C++ will complain about it.

Настройка во время выполнения

Поведение этих функций зависит от установок в php.ini.

Таблица 1. APD Configuration Options

Name	Default	Changeable	Changelog
apd.dumpdir	NULL	PHP_INI_ALL
apd.statement_tracing	"0"	PHP_INI_ALL

Для подробного описания констант PHP_INI_*, обратитесь к документации функции ini_set().

Краткое разъяснение конфигурационных директив.

apd.dumpdir string

Sets the directory in which APD writes profile dump files. You can specify an absolute path or a relative path.

You can specify a different directory as an argument to apd_set_pprof_trace().

apd.statement_tracing boolean

Specfies whether or not to do per-line tracings. Turning this on (1) will impact the performance of your application.

Типы ресурсов

Данное расширение не определяет никакие типы ресурсов.

Предопределенные константы

Перечисленные ниже константы определены данным расширением и могут быть доступны только в том случае, если PHP был собран с поддержкой этого расширения или же в том случае, если данное расширение подгружается во время выполнения.

Таблица 2. APD constants

Constant	Value	Description
`FUNCTION_TRACE` (integer)	1
`ARGS_TRACE` (integer)	2
`ASSIGNMENT_TRACE` (integer)	4
`STATEMENT_TRACE` (integer)	8
`MEMORY_TRACE` (integer)	16
`TIMING_TRACE` (integer)	32
`SUMMARY_TRACE` (integer)	64
`ERROR_TRACE` (integer)	128
`PROF_TRACE` (integer)	256
`APD_VERSION` (string)	example: `1.0.2-dev`

How to use PHP-APD in your scripts

As the first line of your PHP script, call the apd_set_pprof_trace() function to start the trace:

apd_set_pprof_trace();

You can insert the line anywhere in your script, but if you do not start tracing at the beginning of your script you discard profile data that might otherwise lead you to a performance bottleneck.
Now run your script. The dump output will be written to apd.dumpdir/pprof_pid.ext.
Подсказка: If you're running the CGI version of PHP, you will need to add the '-e' flag to enable extended information for apd to work properly. For example: php -e -f script.php

To display formatted profile data, issue the pprofp command with the sort and display options of your choice. The formatted output will look something like:
bash-2.05b$ pprofp -R /tmp/pprof.22141.0 Trace for /home/dan/testapd.php Total Elapsed Time = 0.00 Total System Time = 0.00 Total User Time = 0.00 Real User System secs/ cumm %Time (excl/cumm) (excl/cumm) (excl/cumm) Calls call s/call Memory Usage Name -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 100.0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1 0.0000 0.0009 0 main 56.9 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1 0.0005 0.0005 0 apd_set_pprof_trace 28.0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 10 0.0000 0.0000 0 preg_replace 14.3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 10 0.0000 0.0000 0 str_replace

The -R option used in this example sorts the profile table by the amount of real time the script spent executing a given function. The "cumm call" column reveals how many times each function was called, and the "s/call" column reveals how many seconds each call to the function required, on average.

To generate a calltree file that you can import into the KCacheGrind profile analysis application, issue the pprof2calltree comand.

Contact information

If you have comments, bugfixes, enhancements or want to help developing this beast, you can send an mail to apd@mail.communityconnect.com. Any help is very welcome.

add a note User Contributed Notes
Advanced PHP debugger

judas dot iscariote at gmail dot com
07-May-2006 10:52


if you are looking for better/different alternatives to APD, check the xdebug website http://www.xdebug.org or download it from PECL http://pecl.php.net/xdebug

bugbuster at darrencampbell dot com dot au
22-May-2005 01:53


Locate the root-cause of defects, fast.



If you need to locate the source of a defect in complicated web-based PHP applications with lots of conditional includes (osCommerce and Zen-Cart are reasonably complex), use APD to create a profile dump.



Then filter the dump for lines containing "!" to produce a list of included (required) files in the order they were included.



On my Win98 dev box I use: find "!" dumpfile > trace_program.txt



I use the trace_program.txt to backtrack to the root-cause of defects appearing in the browser.  Great for maintaining systems you did not build yourself.

ng4rrjanbiah at rediffmail dot com
05-Apr-2005 10:52


Some useful links on APD:

1. Profiling PHP Applications ( http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george/talks/Profiling-phpworks-2004.pdf ), [1.40 MB], George Schlossnagle, 2004-09-23

2. PHP Performance Profiling ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7213 ), [13.16 KB], Jonathan Oxer, 2003-10-21

3. APD Wiki ( http://www.wiki.cc/php/Apd )



HTH,

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah

yoghurtmetperzik at gmail dot com
25-Jan-2005 07:15


If pprofp reports 'No such file or directory', it's probably because it contains an incorrect path to your php client. Open pprofp in your fav editor, edit the first line, and try again.

add a note

IV. Advanced PHP debugger