Xhprof is abonond, document why is still a prod requirement

[mikkeschiren]

lox/xhprof is an abandoned project, and have no updates since 2015.
There should be documentation why this still is needed as a prod requirement.

[sgiehl]

@tsteur would you mind commenting this one? I'm actually not sure if the requirement ist still needed. Unless someone wants to debug a productive system I don't think it's needed or am I wrong?

[tsteur]

As long as it is possible to still collect data on production, then we could remove it and let people know they will need to view them locally. Looking at #17939 it may be required to profile locally?

[sgiehl]

@tsteur We could remove that from core maybe and provide that dependency with a plugin instead. That way everyone who wants to debug could install the plugin.

[tsteur]

That could work. Or maybe there's an alternative package we can use that's being updated? Just thinking that might be simpler for us and for users. Also then we won't need to worry re adding support for all the different profiling like --xhprof via a plugin or so. No big preference though, just a thought.

[sgiehl]

Couldn't find any other package that is still maintained. Moving it to a plugin sound like the most viable solution for me. I'll put it to prio queue, so we can consider doing that at some point.

[mikkeschiren]

As, I understand it, xhprof, doesn't work in PHP8, it should be removed from core, for those want to run it, and are still on PHP 7, it should be a plugin.

[tsteur]

FYI xhprof and tideways profiler do work with PHP 8, we used it just two weeks ago

[textagroup]

Found the following fork which is being kept up to date the fork does not have a composer.json file and is not listed on packagist but I have raised a PR to add a composer.json file to the fork.

Have also created the following branch of matomo which replaces the current version of xhprof.
However I have not tested this I will start by seeing if the PHPUnit test pass first of all.

[michalkleiner]

We are also on track to providing ddev configuration for Matomo and ddev already comes with xhprof support which uses the fork Kirk found, so I would probably wait a bit until that's finalised, allowing us to perhaps save some time and not double up on the work.