As a website developer, it is important to build applications that have tools to monitor their performance to ensure they run as required. You may develop tools with poor integration and realize that they are not performing as required. If you are not careful, users may lose confidence with your apps. Therefore it’s important to gauge their performance so that you can rectify when there is a technical issue. Although there are several monitoring tools, only a few are reliable. You should choose tools in your PHP development that cater to your organizational needs.

This tool will explore five of the most effective PHP performance tools. The good thing about being a PHP developer is the availability of numerous resources and tools to make development work easier. Having said here are 5 PHP performance monitoring tools that you should consider in your development work. 

PHP Code Profilers

These tools are widely used in web development to check for weak points of a website or improve its performance. PHP code profilers are divided into two types: standard and tracing profilers. Standard profilers are used to record stack traces of your application. Tracing profilers, on the other hand, are used in coding due to their lightweight nature. With standard profilers, you can get snapshots of CPU metrics, time spent per line of code, memory usage, and frequency of method calls. Tracing profilers are greater advantages over standard since they are used every day and they don’t slow down your website speed. They catch errors in real-time, rather than later making then the first line of defense when dealing with bugs. 

Code profilers sample vital information in your CPU usage and storage. These are expensive elements in your website that need to be optimized. Failure to do so may lead to future memory loss that can damage your database or crash your systems. You can track down memory leaks to enhance performance and storage. If you are having problems with your storage, standard profilers will provide you with answers. Tracing profilers, on the other hand, are used daily catching errors as they unfold. Since most code profilers are free, developers can debug in any environment including the production stage. This tool plays a big part in PHP development services.

PHP Application Performance Management (APM) Tools

When developing an app, it’s important to track their behavior in different scenarios. This helps developers to catch underperforming parts of the apps so that they can optimize those parts to improve their performance. Most of the time, applications are slowed down by small parts. Performance bottlenecks occur during API calls and database queries. Apps have to wait for these processes to complete so that they can proceed to the next task. You can use a tool like a Retrace to monitor app performance. Retrace can also show developers which pages are active or loaded most of the time. They can check the time used to complete processes. This is crucial for tracking queries, pages, and request needed for optimization.

Developers who are looking for deep profiling will find APM tools useful since they track servers, web requests, database, logs, and code performance to establish which one of them is the slowest and needs optimization. You can track customers review to see if they were satisfied, SQL query performances and most popular web requests.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) Tools

Real user monitoring tools depend on services that measure app performance in the background. Data is collected by a small JavaScript in a website as a visitor browses the web application. RUM records the viewed pages and the time spent on each page. This helps users to find appropriate areas to display ads for maximum visibility. Gathered data is also used to improve user experience in applications and websites. RUM is not only used to check user experience and location but also measure application infrastructure components. You will be provided with an overview of how to identify your key users and visitors. With RUM tools you can reduce major errors and improve customer experience leading to improved conversion rate. 

However, RUM has several setbacks one of them being the inability to respond to specific issues. RUM can’t find the root cause of errors making it difficult to offer solutions based on the analysis provided. Another disadvantage of RUM is that users cannot monitor the performance of a new app making it hard to know whether it’s performing as expected. You can’t monitor the peak and off-peak, engagement to establish what is affecting the app. This leaves you with more questions than answers. Is RUM the best tool to check performance? 

Web Server Access Logs

For tools like Retrace to effectively work and monitor web applications, time, request path, status, and logs, you need event date in the web server’s access logs. If it’s not present in the logs, it can be enabled when configuring the webserver. Retrace can formulate requests per minute, HTTP error request data of the web application, and average load time, from data, collected in the access logs.

Exception Tracking

Unlike other programming languages, PHP Web Development can handle exceptions well. It is critical to track exceptions because they usually stop system execution. However, it is difficult to track all these exceptions, if the system is throwing exceptions in the back-end. Therefore it’s important to have exception tracking tools to allow developers to access these crucial logs.

Final Remarks

PHP is a reputable programming language used by web developers globally since it is open-sourced and easy to use. However, you need effective tools to track and monitor its performance to give users great user experience and return of investment. I trust that these tools will help you as a PHP WordPress developer to improve your delivery when using PHP to develop and run websites.