Got some interesting results tonight from my adventures with xdebug and CodeIgniter, specifically with the autoloading feature.

I had run xdebug to collect stats on my app’s landing page, the page where all users will be redirected after login. I’d naturally expect this to be one of the most heavily visited pages, therefore has to be as optimized as possible. After running the results of xdebug’s profiler (“xdebug.profiler_enable=On” in php.ini) through WinCacheGrind I found something like 300+ calls being made to the method CodeIgniter uses to load a library file/class. I had long suspected that liberal use of $CI->load->library(‘MY_Blah’) wasn’t necessarily good practice, but I didn’t suspect it could have been that bad.

So I decided to put my most-frequently loaded libraries into the autoload.php and remove any calls to load them in my libraries, controller, and views. The difference was noticeable, and a second pass through xdebug and WinCacheGrind proved the improvement was real. I tried not to go overboard by loading too many classes, and it seems like I was able to strike the right balance by autoloading less than ten of my dozens of classes.

Another interesting result was integrating memcache to save some of the objects that are frequently loaded on the landing page. These objects are for the most part shared across all users on the site. For some reason after I integrated memcache the memory usage for the controller (according to CodeIgniter) went up to around 8MB from 2MB. Very weird results that I’m going to have to think about. Database load on the page is near nothing, which is good news. I’m assuming the problem is in copying the objects out of memcache and creating PHP objects out of them.

Guess I’ll be doing some more profiling.

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