What is PHP X-Ray

PHP X-Ray is a performance monitoring tool available to developers and users who want to optimize their website performance but need help identifying and monitoring performance issues in their PHP application (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.).

With PHP X-Ray, you can gather and visualize information about slow URLs, slow Plugins, slow Database queries, slow functions, and slow external calls to your website.

Get detailed information on performance bottlenecks in WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal websites. You can diagnose such problems in an automated way.

How to use PHP X-Ray

Each time you want to run a performance check, you can create a new Tracing task from within your cPanel by clicking the Start tracing button.

Start a new Tracing task

URL – This field is pre-loaded with your Domain, but allow you to choose any additional Domain that is already setup in cPanel, and also Sub-domains. In the field next to URL is the Mask, where you can set a specifc path. If you want to trace the root of your domain go with /*

Advanced settings – When you select this option, you get 3 additional options available: Client’s IP and Time period or Requests.

Client’s IP – Specify the IP that is the source of your incoming web traffic for this Tracing task. This is particularly useful if you want to set your URL string apart for other HTTP requests.

Time period – The period of time you want this tracing task to run. Interval between 1 minute and 2 days.

Request – The amount of requests that PHP X-Ray will collect

View Tracing task list

Collected requests for tracing task

The Software modules/plugins section displays the following data

• Software type – a type a module/plugin. For now, X-Ray can analyze only WordPress software
• Software module – a name of the WordPress plugin
• Duration – plugin execution time
• Duration (%) – plugin execution time as a percentage of the total duration of the request

The Database queries section displays the following data:

• Query – the executed SQL-query
• File – the file and the line of the executed query and backtrace
• Software module – a WordPress plugin name from which the request was completed. If the request does not belong to any of the WordPress plugin, the name of the function that executed the given request is displayed
• Calls – the number of identical SQL queries
• Duration – execution time as a percentage of the total duration of a request and the function processing time (in brackets)

The External requests section displays the following data:

• URL – the URL of the executed request
• File – the file and the line of the executed request and backtrace
• Duration – execution time as a percentage of the total duration of a request and the function processing time (in brackets)

The System functions section displays the following data:

• Function – the executed function
• File – the file and the line of the executed request
• Duration – execution time as a percentage of the total duration of a request and the function processing time (in brackets)