Browsing articles tagged with " php"

Find Performance Problems Using JMeter, MySQL and Xdebug/Webgrind

Nov 26, 2012 // by Jeff Treuting // Blog // No Comments

On a recent project, I was tasked with analyzing an existing application and determining what could be done to improve its performance: meaning page load times. The site was written in PHP with a MySQL database so I’ll focus this post on how I went about it for this set of technologies.

Baseline Metrics

With any optimization project the first thing you should do is create a set of baseline metrics for how the application is currently performing. Why? So you can take full credit for all the wonderful improvements you make, of course. You’ll be able to say smart things like, “We were able to increase overall performance by 243.71%.”

A great open source tool for creating these baseline metrics is Apache JMeter (http://jmeter.apache.org/). You can use JMeter for performance testing as well as load testing. The basic idea is that you create a test plan and then tell it to run that plan for X users Y times each and it plugs away at it while keeping track of page load times along the way. You can create a single test plan to go through all of the common actions within the application or create a different test plan for each logical section, it’s up to you. I would start with a general plan that covers most of the application and then add more later if needed.