Benchmarking PHP page load times

Question

How could I measure the time taken to load a page (with various different PHP statements)?

Somewhat like the stats available here - http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/24

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this. I've personally been a fan of using microtime in the following way:

// Start of code
$time = microtime(true); // Gets microseconds

// Rest of code

// End of code
echo "Time Elapsed: ".(microtime(true) - $time)."s";

That will give you microsecond accuracy.

If you are writing command-line scripts (like Facebook puzzles), you can use just time.

time php dancebattle.php ~/input.dat
Win

real    0m0.152s
user    0m0.142s
sys     0m0.012s

I forgot about the method of monitoring page load times (from a browser). You can use the NET tab from Firebug (for Firefox) to do just that. It will let you watch the various file loads (AJAX, JS, CSS, Images, etc.).