Tideways and XHGui

VVV has different extensions available for developers, one of them is Tideways (open source version) and is an optional tool described on their website as:

Tideways saves you time by taking the guesswork out of your app’s backend performance. Gain detailed insights, spot performance bottlenecks, and get real-time error detection alerts.

What Is It?

Tideways is a PHP module for PHP 7.0+ that enables profiling everything that happens in a page. One must execute specific PHP code to use Tideways, this code gathers data and visualizes it. We added XHGui,a graphical interface for Tideways, that provides a complete ability to analyze the gathered data.

Installing Tideways

By default VVV does not install Tideways to keep the VM lightweight, but if you look for this line in config/config.yml:

    #- tideways # PHP profiling tool, also installs xhgui check https://varyingvagrantvagrants.org/docs/en-US/references/tideways-xhgui/

And remove the comment so it looks like this:

    - tideways # PHP profiling tool, also installs xhgui check https://varyingvagrantvagrants.org/docs/en-US/references/tideways-xhgui/

Then Tideways will be installed when you reprovision using vagrant up --provision

How To Enable Tideways

To make Tideways and XHGui work, you need to make sure tideways is added to the extensions in your config.yml for example:

extensions:
  core: # The core VVV extension
    - tideways # PHP profiling tool, also installs XHGui

To enable tideways, SSH into the VM and run tideways_on. This will turn off XDebug and turn on Tideways. Turning on XDebug will turn off tideways as the two cannot run at the same time. You can also use tideways_off to disable Tideways.

How to profile

How To Profile A Page

You can profile a single page with tideways by adding ?enable-tideways=1 to the URL.

Profiling All Pages On A Site

Create a new parameter tideways: true in your config.yml and reprovision. Now all pages on that sites domains will be profiled automatically without adding parameters to the URLs.

For example:

sites:
  wordpress-one:
    repo: https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/custom-site-template.git
    tideways: true
    hosts:
      - one.wordpress.test

Now after reprovisioning, all requests to one.wordpress.test will be profiled and appear in XHGui.

Viewing Profile Results

To see the results of profiling, visit http://xhgui.vvv.test where you will find an install of XHGui.

How To Use XHGui

Here are some guides on using XHGui:

Our custom implementation

To improve the data quality we added support to suspend Query Monitor plugin activities when Tideways is enabled. We also implemented support for a custom PHP custom-header.php file in VVV/www/default/xhgui/config that will be prepended if it is available.

We added support for a custom config file custom-config.php in the same folder that can change the values of XHGui that will be merged with the VVV default. This can be helpful to filter via other methods, such as from the list like from specific plugins and so on.

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6. Reference