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Funny timing — I just spent 4 hours this morning comparing Xdebug, Blackfire, and New Relic.
After feeling like my SaaS application is starting to hit some scaling bottlenecks, I had a play with all 3 services to try and get some insight for a real-world application.
A brief summary:
- Xdebug: Slow. Fiddly to set up. Fine for a development environment and day-to-day profiling, but things like Clockwork[0] are, practically speaking, far more insightful.
- Blackfire: Terrible UX. Difficult setup process. Their free plan is almost impossible to evaluate as it only shows you glorified stack traces, most of which are littered with vendor and framework files. I didn’t want to commit to paying a full year of their standard plan (no monthly payment unless options, unless you go for the highest tiers), so I happily uninstalled and moved on.
- New Relic: wow… one command and a server reboot later, and I’m seeing performance profiling, consolidated dashboards, error logging, MariaDB and Redis queries, frontend performance, and server capacities - with REAL data, on production! I’m very, very impressed. And it’s free for a single user…?!
[0] Clockwork: https://underground.works/clockwork/
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https://github.com/NoiseByNorthwest/php-spx
SPX could be loaded with docker-compose like this article does for Xdebug. But if you already have a PHP environment, the easiest way to install it is to compile it (sudo apt install php-dev && make && cp modules/spx.so /usr/lib/php/....).
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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