Count number of file requests triggered - php

Question

Is it possible with PHP(5) or other Linux tools on an apache debian webserver to get the file requests a single http request made?
for performance reasons i would like to compare them with the cached "version" of my cake app.
non-cached that might be over 100 in some views.
cached only up to 10 (hopefully).
afaik there are 3 main file functions:
file_get_contents(), file() and the manual fopen() etc
but i cannot override them so i cannot place a logRequest() function in them.
is there any other way? attaching callbacks to functions? intercepting the file requests?

Answer 1

This suggestion does not seems intuitive, but you can take look on xdebug - function trace
Once you have xdebug installed and enabled, you can using all sort of configuration to save the profiling into a disk file and you can retrieve it later. Such as profiling results for different URL save into different disk file.
To monitoring file system related functions, you can do a parse of the text file(profiling results) and do a count of matchable functions (programmable or manually)

Answer 2

The way I would do it would be to create a custom function that wraps around the one you need.
function custom_file_get_contents($filename) {
$GLOBALS['file_get_contents_count']++;
return file_get_contents($filename);
}
And just replace all of your calls to file_get_contents with custom_file_get_contents. This is just a rudimentary example, but you get the idea.
Side note, if you want to count how many files your script has included (or required), see get_included_files()

Answer 3

You can use Xdebug to log all function calls
Those so-called "function traces" can be a help for when you are new to an application or when you are trying to figure out what exactly is going on when your application is running. The function traces can optionally also show the values of variables passed to the functions and methods, and also return values. In the default traces those two elements are not available.
http://www.xdebug.org/docs/execution_trace

Answer 4

Interesting question. I'd start with the stream_wrapper ... try to replace them with custom classes.

Answer 5

There is a pecl extention called ADB (Advanced PHP Debugger) that has tow functions that would be very useful for a cse like this - override_function() and rename_function(). You could do something like this:
rename_function('file_get_contents', 'file_get_contents_orig');
function file_get_contents($filename) {
logRequest();
return file_get_contents_orig($filename);
}
It looks like ADB is pretty easy to install, too.
See http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.apd.php