X-Ray Guide: PHP performance tracking

Dynamic sites made with content managers suffer from bottlenecks somewhere. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento are classic examples of wonderful sites, and many times slow. But we will no longer have to investigate in depth to solve the causes since a new tool —part of Cloud Linux OS Shared Pro— came to solve it for us: PHP X-Ray.

A problem with a plugin, a slowdown in database queries, a conflict in a function or external call? X-Ray will reveal its origin.

What is PHP X-Ray?

PHP X-Ray is a computer system for internal monitoring of what happens on a website (as long as your server has Cloud Linux OS Shared Pro). PHP X-Ray allows us to analyze the resource usage of our website and find the cause of high resource usage.

PHP X-Ray was specifically developed to fix performance issues on PHP-based websites. Typical bottlenecks are:

• slow plugins
• Slow database queries
• slow functions
• slow external calls

After starting to run a trace, we will visit our site normally giving PHP X-Ray enough scenarios to find the problems. Once the site has been analyzed, we can see a report.

How do you use PHP X-Ray?

The first thing we must do is enter our control panel of the site in question.

Typically, we will write cpanel.mysite.com replacing mysite.com by the real URL of our website.

After entering cPanel, we will look for the icon indicated in the screenshot below within the "Software" group of apps.

We will be presented with the following screen where we just have to click on the green button.

Next, we will choose the domain from the dropdown menu.

And then we will write a "mask", that is, a specific url. If we want to poll the entire site, just write an asterisk as shown in the screenshot below.

Finally, click on the RUN button.

After a small loading animation, the page will refresh and we will see something similar to the following:

The seven columns show us the following information (1) The url of the domain (and folder) where the scan is being executed. As we have written an asterisk in the mask section, this will result in a scan of the entire site (as opposed to entering a folder, for example “blog”, in which case only bottlenecks will be checked in that section). (2) The tracking status. (3) The IP of the client. (4) The number of samples collected in the elapsed time (at the beginning of the scan, it will be zero by logic). (5) The time the study takes to complete (it is 30 days) (6) The date the bottleneck check was created. (7) Two buttons are shown. The eye icon is used to check trouble reports on a separate screen, and the square stop It allows us to stop the created verification (prior confirmation message, in case we touch it by mistake).

To the extent that problems are collected, they will appear ordered by the conflict that slows down our site the most.

For example, if it turns out that an installed plugin is the cause of the gross slowness of our website, we can uninstall it and try one that meets the same needs but without jeopardizing our resources.

View completed study reports

At any time we can see what is happening as we mentioned, by pressing the eye icon. This same button is the one that we will also go to once the follow-up is complete.

Thus, we will be able to see something compatible with the lower capture.

Of course, depending on the problem and also on how familiar we are with our CMS, PHP or the operation of a server, we will solve the items presented in the report. Generally, notable problems occur in components, so we will have to carry out tests in this sense (or directly uninstall something that works badly, bringing down the whole site).

In parallel, we can see a quick video of all this here.

We have reached the end of this guide and we appreciate reading it. We are writing tutorials and analysis of web tools permanently in our Blog.

Wishing you success in your endeavors, we invite you to leave impressions and experiences in the comments section below.