In his latest post to the Liip blog Christian Stocker points out that the New Relic extension for HHVM has been updated for the latest versions of HHVM to work a bit more seamlessly.

Since HHVM 3.4 it's theoretically possible to have your own external profiler for function level profiling (like xhprof or xdebug) without having to recompile HHVM itself. Unfortunately it wasn't perfect (or I couldn't make it running), but there's a patch in the master branch now (the upcoming 3.6), which seems to solve that problem. So I worked a little bit on my extension in the last few days and I adjusted a lot of things and improved some other stuff.

He talks about the improvements New Relic has made on their functionality and some slowness that still exists in the "hotprofiler". He points out, however, that if you just want overall statistics and not specific, method level ones, you don't really even need to use it. He offers a word of caution when using his extension and when it may fall back to "userland level profiling" instead.

The NetTuts.com Code blog has posted the second part of their series showing how to use the New Relic monitoring service in various kinds of web applications. In the previous article they looked at using it in a Ruby application, but in this new post it's all about PHP.

Today, we will look at how to monitor a PHP application using New Relic. More specifically, we will set up a basic WordPress installation and get some performance data about it, in the New Relic dashboards. [...] With the PHP version of the agent, the environment is a lot more important, as the agent is installed and lives on the box where the application will be deployed, rather than being part of any particular app.

They use an EC2 instance for their example, but the steps can be applied on other systems. They help you get the needed software installed, validate they're correctly configured and do a basic setup of WordPress. Next up is the steps to install the New Relic "newrelic-php5" software and get it fully installed. They also include the updates you'll need to make to your Apache configuration to configure the New Relic instance and how to keep the agent up to date.

In this new post to the Liip blog Christian Stocker talks about how they use the popular application and server monitoring service New Relic with the HHVM (despite no official support).

As discussed in one of my last blog posts, we really like New Relic for performance metrics and use it a lot. Unfortunately there isn't an extension for HHVM (yet) and HHVM is becoming an important part in our setup. But - a big great coincidence - New Relic released an Agent SDK and with that, an example extension for HHVM and WordPress. That was a great start for me to get behind the whole thing.

He talks about writing a HHVM extension and includes an example of the implementation. Christian also talks about the challenges around profiling data and finding out where the requests "spend their time" in the execution. There's two solutions he suggests, but they each have their tradeoffs (a recompiled/patched version or a performance hit). He provides the extension they've built in this github repository.

On the Inviqa techPortal today there's a new post talking about the New Relic monitoring service and what it has to offer PHP developers and their applications to help them manage things like performance and resources.

The performance of a web application plays a critical role in how an application is perceived by its users. It is important to measure it, identify the causes if it changes and react swiftly to any unexpected changes. This article describes an industry leading tool, New Relic, and how it can be used to monitor and improve your site performance. [...] New Relic is a real-time application monitoring service, providing various metrics about the performance of your production site, covering everything from application database queries through to the time it takes for the end-user to view a page.

They walk you through a "getting started" with the tool and how to get it running on your server - for PHP this means installing an "agent" extension and a local daemon for it to feed information back to. They then get into some of the data New Relic provides including application performance details, browser information, throughput and an Apdex score.