Xdebug Profiler Files Not In xdebug.profiler_output_dir

Published: January 17, 2019

Tags:

• PHP

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Something that’s tripped up both myself and devs that I’ve worked with is not finding Xdebug profiler files in the expected directory (/tmp by default).

It usually goes something like this…

• Enable the Xdebug profiler by adding xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 1 to a .ini file.
• Make a request with ?XDEBUG_PROFILE =1 in the GET string.
• Check for the output file in /tmp
• Pull out hair because it’s not there.

This may be accompanied by running a sanity check, only to be accompanied by more hair pulling…

$ php -r 'var_dump(ini_get("xdebug.profiler_output_dir"));'
string(4) "/tmp"

If you find yourself in this situation, the likely cause is that your system is using PrivateTmp.

In this case the cachegrind file will actually be placed in a folder like this:

/tmp/systemd-private-ff40cf656c534501b9735e4b53c9bcd3-php-fpm.service-4C70G0/tmp/

The best way to find the file in this case is as follows:

sudo find /tmp/ -name '*cachegrind*'