Benchmarking PHP page load times

Question

How could I measure the time taken to load a page (with various different PHP statements)?

Somewhat like the stats available here - http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/24

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this. I've personally been a fan of using microtime in the following way:

// Start of code
$time = microtime(true); // Gets microseconds

// Rest of code

// End of code
echo "Time Elapsed: ".(microtime(true) - $time)."s";

That will give you microsecond accuracy.

If you are writing command-line scripts (like Facebook puzzles), you can use just time.

time php dancebattle.php ~/input.dat
Win

real    0m0.152s
user    0m0.142s
sys     0m0.012s

I forgot about the method of monitoring page load times (from a browser). You can use the NET tab from Firebug (for Firefox) to do just that. It will let you watch the various file loads (AJAX, JS, CSS, Images, etc.).

Answer 2

Put the following code at the top of your PHP page.

<?php
$statrttime = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $statrttime);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$start = $time;
?>

The following code has to be put at the end of your page.

<?php
$endtime = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $endtime);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$finish = $time;
$total_time = round(($finish - $start), 4);
echo 'Page load in '.$total_time.' seconds.';
?>

Note: If you measure the time for particular part of the code put this right start and last PHP code part.

Answer 3

The Output in that presentation seem to be copied from Siege (http://www.joedog.org/index/siege-home).

Another quite useful tool for "real world" performance testing your whole application stack is Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/) and YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/)

Answer 4

Try https://github.com/fotuzlab/appgati

It allows to define steps in the code and reports time, memory usage, server load etc between two steps.

Something like:

    $appgati->Step('1');

    // Do some code ...

    $appgati->Step('2');

    $report = $appgati->Report('1', '2');
    print_r($report);

Sample output array:

Array
(
    [Clock time in seconds] => 1.9502429962158
    [Time taken in User Mode in seconds] => 0.632039
    [Time taken in System Mode in seconds] => 0.024001
    [Total time taken in Kernel in seconds] => 0.65604
    [Memory limit in MB] => 128
    [Memory usage in MB] => 18.237907409668
    [Peak memory usage in MB] => 19.579357147217
    [Average server load in last minute] => 0.47
    [Maximum resident shared size in KB] => 44900
    [Integral shared memory size] => 0
    [Integral unshared data size] => 0
    [Integral unshared stack size] => 
    [Number of page reclaims] => 12102
    [Number of page faults] => 6
    [Number of block input operations] => 192
    [Number of block output operations] => 
    [Number of messages sent] => 0
    [Number of messages received] => 0
    [Number of signals received] => 0
    [Number of voluntary context switches] => 606
    [Number of involuntary context switches] => 99
)

Answer 5

Using microtime() PHP function you will know exactly how much time is needed for your PHP code to be executed. Follow the steps below to put the PHP code on your web page:

Put the following code at the very top of your PHP page (if you measure the time needed for particular part of the code put this right before that PHP code part)

<?php
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$start = $time;
?>

The following code has to be put at the very end of the web page (or the end of the PHP code part)

<?php
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$finish = $time;
$total_time = round(($finish - $start), 4);
echo 'Page generated in '.$total_time.' seconds.';

If not works use microtime(true) instead of microtime()

Answer 6

You can use microtime() at the start of processing and at end of output, then calculate the difference and convert it to seconds if wanted.

This will only measure the execution time for PHP side, not the whole page load time at it seems to be in your link, but it will able you to compare various methods performance, for instance.