I recently started web development. The course I took was to install WAMP and start developing right away. I used an atom text editor, this -combined with wamp- proved to be a very fast way to write client-side code(HTML, CSS, Javascript).
But when I started to write serverside PHP things got a little messy. I should probably explain my site's structure here.
I keep separate PHP, CSS, javascript files for every page on the client side, for the server side a have 2 different types of PHP files:
Files that only perform a specific operation on the database(For example returning "5 more answers"). These are always called by AJAX requests.
Files that load the page for the first time. These are only used when the user opens the page for the first time, they do necessary database queries and return the page. Later requests always go to the 1st type of PHP files.
Now regarding my problem. I debugged until now by printing variables to the screen with var_dump() or echoing. But this started to become too slow as the data I work with grew. I wonder if there is a way of debugging which will let me but a breakpoint in one of my PHP files. Then, when I open it on the browser, on the localhost I created using WAMP, will let me go through the PHP file step by step.
I have been dealing with this issue for 3 days, I tried to make it work with Eclipse IDE but couldn't find a way. Also, there seems to be no tutorials or Q&A on the internet regarding the issue.
Breakpoint debugging opens a whole new world, and is the natural step after var_dump() debugging. Not only does it speed up development, but it provides much more information about your code, as you can step through each line and see what values have been set at each step, and how they evolve as your program executes its code. This means you can track the entirety of the values at different stages with one run - imagine tracking all variables at each point using var_dump()!
Although choosing an IDE is a personal decision based on personal taste, i strongly recommend you try out PhpStorm. If you can get a student licence go for it.
PhpStorm has extensive documentation & tutorials on all features in the IDE, debugging is no exception:
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/configuring-xdebug.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GokeXqI93x8
I don't know of a specific solution to your issue. I'm not exactly sure what you're doing but as a quick tip, I find add the following snippet to the top of the file useful as it will highly error more easily rather than browser just say nope.
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
Hope this help you a bit.
I tried out what's recommended in comments and answers. I first tried Netbeans. To be fair it disappointed me. Download kept getting stuck at 100%, even for different versions. When I stopped downloading and went ahead to create a php project, there was missing parts I guess. I couldn't even manage to create a php project. But that might just be me not being able to do it.
Then I followed #leuquim's answer and #Alex Howansky's comment and downloaded PHPStorm. And I got it to work in no more than 20 minutes. I downloaded it with a student's licence. For people who want to use PHPStorm with WAMP here's a Youtube tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxX4vnZFbZU
One thing to note in the video is that, maker of the video chooses PHP Web Application in the Run Configurations. That has been changed to PHP Web Page.
Related
I'm a self taught programmer and I consider PHP one of my strongest languages. There are undoubtedly some things I don't do correctly though, since I'm not in the field and I've never had anyone leaning over my shoulder telling me about better ways.
The most cumbersome thing to me about php is debugging code. It's not too bad when I'm writing a script called with AJAX or php code inside of a webpage, because I can simply output values directly to the page. When I'm writing code without a client side though, I currently resort to outputting my debug info to the error_log. I have to navigate to it (which sometimes is a task in itself, refreshing directories to make it show up, etc), check whatever value I outputted to it, then open up my script and start working again.
I feel like there might be a better way, so I thought I'd ask. Is there a trade secret that can shave some seconds off whenever I need to know how many rows a query returns or if a path has been constructed correctly?
My development environments are Coda on my MacBook and Zend on my PC. I work on everything remotely. Nearly all my code requires the server environment to run correctly.
Update
After writing this, I just realized I could actually make a webpage using WebSockets that acted as an output window. Then import a file into each script with a function that pushed output to the webpage. Hmm... I really like this idea actually.
Me and my friend are in different countries have been developing a LAMP web app for several weeks. All these times we have been sharing source code over ftp. In this way php files become messy. I have heard about CVS, and have been reading about it. But I still cannot figure out how it works exactly.
How does the CVS could help me in this matter ?
I would be much appreciated for someone who point me in the right direction.
Ok here comes a very simple explanation of VCS. After using it for a while you'll laugh at the explanation but for now I guess this should help you.
What are the problems of your current ftp file sharing?
If 2 people upload the same file one of the files will get overwritten
After uploading it you'll only see who changed the file (the last time) but not where it got changed
You can't provide information about the changes (despite putting comments in the files itself)
You can't go back in time, once uploaded old files are lost
With version control you can solve these problems:
Files get either merged into one new file, or get overwritten but the old file will still be stored to roll back if needed
You can see who made which changes when
You can provide comments when you "upload" your files about what got changed (without storing these comments inside files)
You can always go back in time and restore old "uploads"/changes
You can also create small side projects by branching. This basically let's you split your project in smaller pieces and work on them separately.
So at the beginning of your work you usually get your local sources up-to-date by getting all the changes that got made. Then you do your work and afterwards you update the online version with your changes so that other developers can pull these changes and continue to work on them or integrate these changes into their current changes.
How to implement this sorcery?
You could google for "how to implement git" or "how to implement svn" but I would recommend you to use an online service as a beginner. Here is a list of services: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting
My personal preference for closed source projects with a low number of developers is https://bitbucket.org/. You get a small wiki page and bug tracking tool provided with some of the services. If you want to use bitbucket, here is the very easy to understand documentation: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+101
Important to know:
Soon you'll learn that you don't upload files as I've written multiple times but rather change lines of code. You also don't upload them you "commit" them.
While cvs could help, not many developers will recommend using it for new projects. It has largely been replaced with Subversion (svn), but even that is falling out of favour. Many projects these days use distributed version control with git or Mercurial (hg).
A good introduction to git can be found in the free online book Pro Git.
In any case, these things are all version control systems. They help to synchronize the code between developers, and also let you track
who changed code,
when it was changed,
why it was changed, and
how it was changed.
This is very important on projects with multiple developers, but there is value in using such a system even when working on your own.
I have been tasked with setting up a website on various environments for different stages of evaluation (dev/test/staging/etc).
On our staging environment however, it seems there is some difference preventing the PHP script from finishing, so the page is never delivered to the browser.
I'm wondering if there is a way I can output to log some sort of stack trace or backtrace upon cutting the connection, or is there some other method to find out what exactly PHP is doing at any given point in the script's life cycle?
It's a Drupal site, so it involves a lot of code I'm not familiar with, and could take hours to sprinkle die; commands throughout to see where the script is loading to.
I understand I should probably be looking at the differences in environments, however all should have very similar configuration (Ubuntu 11.04) and the staging environment seems entirely happy to serve other PHP sites whilst this particular site is refusing to finish. If anything this staging site has more resources available that other environments which are not having problems.
UPDATE: Sorry all, found the problem in the end. The staging environment was on a VLAN that was not permitted to access itself via public IP, and for whatever reason (still confused about this) it was trying to access itself as part of the page load and never completing the request. Setting a hosts file entry for 127.0.0.1 fixed the issue.
Debugging an issue like this step-by-step using a tool like xDebug is an option, but will probably take a long time -- finding where to put the breakpoints is going to be on about the same level as working out where to put die statements around the code. The debugger option is a better way of doing it, but won't save much in comparison, when you have a problem like this where you have an unknown blocker somewhere in large amounts of unknown code.
But xDebug also has a profiler tool which can show you what functions were called during the program run, how long they took, and highlight where the bottlenecks are. This will probably be a better place to start. Just configure xDebug to generate a profiler trace, and then use kCacheGrind to view the trace in a graphical environment.
If your program is getting stuck in a loop or something specific is taking a long time to complete, this will pinpoint the problem almost straight away; you'll be able to see exactly which function is taking the time, and what the call chain looks like to get to it.
It's quite possible that once you've seen that, you'll be able to find the problem just by looking at the relevant code. But if you can't, you can then use xDebug's step-thru debugger to analyse the function as it runs and see what the variables are set to to see why it's looping.
xDebug can be found here: http://www.xdebug.org/
Use xDebug.
Its very easy to install and use.
it has few options like breakpoints and step by step to track status of PHP script before finishes loading
and you can download xDebug from here http://www.xdebug.org/
step by step tutoril for set up xdebug is availble at sachithsays.blogspot.com/
UPDATE 1:
After doing an strace on the server, I have discovered that the mmap's process is taking 90% of this processing time. I've discoverd that 1 of the pages is taking a minute to load.
So I found this link:
PHP script keeps doing mmap/munmap
It possibly shows the same problem. However, I don't understand what the anwer means by correctly disabling the php error handlers?
ORIGINAL QUESTION:
How do I check for bottle necks on my web server when loading a specific web page which is being served by my server?
For some reason, a couple of pages on my site have become very slow, and I am not sure where the slowness is happening.
Screenshot from Chrome Dev Tools:
Click here to enlarge:
So basically, I need to find out what is taking this section to long to load? Client Side web tools can't seem to break this down?
Xdebug: Profiling PHP Scripts - pay attention to KCacheGrind tool or, alternatively, you can use Advanced PHP debugger apd_set_pprof_trace() function and pprofp to process generated data file.
Derick Rethans (author of Xdebug) released quite a nice article today called What is PHP doing?
It covers the strace that you've already done, but also shows you how you can use a custom .gdbinit to get the actual php function name that is causing the problem.
Of course you have to run your script from the command line with gdb, so I hope that your problem is reproducible in this way.
mmap is for creating a memory mapped view of a file.
If it really is the error handler causing it, I'd guess that your script is generating a lot of errors (which you are trying to log), maybe a NOTICE for an undefined index in a loop or something).
Check the log file (is anything being logged at all?), check permissions on the log file if nothing is logged, also double check what your error reporting level is set to.
var_dump(ini_get('error_reporting') & E_NOTICE); - Non-zero if you are reporting notices.
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE); - Turn off reporting notices.
I would suggest looking into Xdebug profiling. The other two answers deal with client side loading issues but if your bottleneck is server side it won't become apparent from the use of those tools.
You may also want to look into the database queries that are being run to serve the pages in question. You could be missing an index somewhere which would explain a recent slowness with specific pages as your database tables grow in size.
I would extract those queries and run them using MySQL EXPLAIN (assuming you are using MySQL) to see if there is slowness there.
Using an application such as Fiddler or YSlow Firefox addin will help identify slow loading elements in your website. This should make any issues apparent.
http://fiddler2.com/fiddler2/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/
Hope this helps
Page Speed for Chrome is also an option:
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/using_chrome
I built a php site that is hosted with an ISP. A friend who is a designer is supposed to edit the page content. There's an area on the page that is open for page content, but most of the outer "wrapper" is built with include() files.
When she opens the files in design mode, everything is broken. I tried to set up a test server in DW, but this didn't work either. I never use DW and am stuck.
Is it possible to work on a file off of a server via ftp in real time with DW? If not, can it at least be configured to render the php code in design mode somehow?
Thanks,
D.
PHP is a server-side language, Dreamweaver is catered toward simple client-side HTML web pages. You would need to setup a PHP interpreter somehow in order for Dreamweaver to show you the output of the PHP, last I recall when I used DW years ago it didn't have that feature, so I doubt you'll be able to do this.
#meder: It appears you are correct for exactly the reasons you stated. The last time I used DW, I was only on the code side, so it never came up. I know we were saving to the server then, so I was thinking it could draw it from the server as well.
Alas, no luck. Sorry to post before I RTFW more.