Re: interested in open sourcing a PHP profiler

On Nov 25, 2008, at 4:57 PM, Kannan Muthukkaruppan wrote:

Facebook is interested in open sourcing a hierarchical profiler for PHP that we built in-house and is being used successfully for both ad-hoc performance debugging of PHP programs and as part of a system-wide profiling framework (by running the profiler on a sample of pages in production continually).

Great news!

a) Please let us know if you would accept the extension into PECL and/or if you have any additional questions.

PECL is normally a place for pure C PHP extensions. It sounds like this is actually a few things: 1.) A PECL extension 2.) An application that presents the data aggregated by the PECL extension. I'm going to guess that it'd make more sense to create a stand alone project like phpUnderControl or phpUnit.

b) In terms of license would a Apache 2.0 license or BSD style license be ok?

I believe PECL accepts either. BSD (New BSD) is preferred though.

c) Internally we have been calling this PHProf (short for Php Hierarchical PROFiler) for a while now. But we realized after reading (http://www.php.net/license/) that this isn't desirable. Will changing the name be a precondition for hosting/approval into PECL?

I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing the name would have to be changed. --Joe