Profiling in CodeIgniter

on Tuesday 6th May, 2008 Gabe speculated thusly…

Profiling an application is a great way to see how it is performing. CodeIgniter comes with a profiling class, which you can make calls to from your controllers. However, during development I find profiling so helpful that I want it on all my pages, without having to specifically call it each time. I also want to be able to deploy my development site to a production server – making calls to the profiler throughout the controllers means I would need to edit each and every controller to make sure the profiler wasn’t active on the live server.

After much searching I discovered a better solution. This allows you to add profiling to the bottom of every page (along with its debug info and SQL query info). When you copy the dev site live you just exclude 1 file, and profiling will be removed totally. All you need to do is create a file called MY_Output.php in system/application/libraries that extends the Output core class, with the following contents:

< ?php
# /system/application/libraries/MY_Output.php
if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
class MY_Output extends CI_Output {
function __construct() {
parent::__construct();
$this->enable_profiler( TRUE );
}
}
?>

This will enable profiling output on all your pages for development and debug purposes. When you copy your site to a production server just make sure you don’t copy MY_Output.php file. I normally use rsync for copying live and just add: --exclude="MY_Output.php" to the rsync command.

The condition to using the name MY_Output.php is that you left the variable $config['subclass_prefix'] in config.php as default. This defaults to $config['subclass_prefix'] = 'MY_';, so if you change it you will need to alter the filename of your new class.

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