How to use Xdebug to profile a single php file?

Question

I want to use Xdebug to profile a single php file. From Xdebug documentation, it is said

Profiling is enabled by setting the xdebug.profiler_enable setting to 1 in php.ini. This instructs Xdebug to start writing profiling information into the dump directory configured with the xdebug.profiler_output_dir directive.

I tried but Xdebug will generate so many profile logs. I have no testing environment but only could use production server. I want to know is there any way to set just testing one page?

Any suggestions to do this?

---Update 02/11/2013---------------------------

Finally I choose facebook / xhprof as my production server profiler. I use xhprof_html everyday now. It save a lot of time and very easy to use, especially the Full Callgraph view.

• dev-null-dweller: So you have xdebug on production server. Nice, I always wanted one.
• user503853: What's the problem of Xdebug on production server? I could disable it when I don't need it.

Answer 1

Use the trigger http://xdebug.org/docs/all_settings#profiler_enable_trigger and add it to your url. i.e. http://example.com/mypage.php?XDEBUG_PROFILE=1

Also, XHProf is preferred over XDebug when profiling on production: https://github.com/facebook/xhprof

• user503853: Thanks for XHProf on production

Answer 2

There is another option in the xdebug configuration that will do this: xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger. Set it to 1 and then open the URL you want to profile with a querystring suffix of ?XDEBUG_PROFILE. It will then write a log just for that script.

• cprn: If you want to profile single session in CLI use environment variable export XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=session_name profiler_enable=1 instead.