Introduction

DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework supported by the OpenSolaris 2008.05 OS. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to enable developers to detect the behavior of their applications without any significant performance impact. DTrace enables you to explore your PHP application to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. In this article, we will try to analyze some performance related aspects of PHP applications.

DTrace helps you understand your application by enabling you to dynamically record additional data that you specify at locations of interest, called probes. A Dtrace provider for PHP that adds probes to function entry and exit points is available with OpenSolaris 2008.05, if you have downloaded and installed the amp package.

DTrace support is also available in Solaris 10.

For more information about DTrace, see the DTrace User Documentation at http://wikis.sun.com/display/DTrace/Introduction.