Performance Testing I

Introduction

Speediness (execution) is one of the principles for RawDev. In order to both improve the execution time of your code as well as getting a better feel for how your coding impacts performance the RTimer object is a useful tool. The RTimer object is very simple and useful for simple situations. Examples of more advanced tools are xdebug profiler data and apache "ab" which tests performance under load.

How it works

The RTimer tool works just like a stopwatch. You can start the timer and take lap times. Lap times can be associated with labels. You can display an overview of all lap times and the total time. All methods are static so that time measurements can be taken anywhere without the use of global variables.

Example

<?php

require_once("rawdev/RawDev.php");
require_once(RAWDEV_LIB.'/Util/Timer.php'); 

RTimer::start(); # starts the timer

usleep(123);

RTimer::lap('sleep'); # records a lap time with label 'sleep'

RTimer::display(); # displays the lap times

?>

Results

php ~/rawdev/samples/Util/timer.php 
          sleep: 0.000248sec
          Total: 0.000248sec

Conclusion

I personally use this library all the time. It helps me become a better programmer by understanding which statements take longer then others. The timer is extremely easy to use but does not take performance testing under heavy load into account. Other tools such as the xdebug profiler are useful as well but they take more time to setup.

Finally, executing timer functions take time themselves (< ~.0001sec) so you want to (a) just be aware of that, (b) execute a piece of code multiple times (e.g. 100 times) to get a more accurate picture.

Links

• RTimer API Documentation
• Download