• About PHP X-Ray.
• How it works.
• For Administrators.
• For End-Users.
• Documentation.
• To test out PHP X-Ray with a free CloudLinux OS+ trial.
  

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When your website performance fails, it’s usually an issue with the Content Management System (CMS) or a poorly optimized plugin, but how does a webmaster analyze the issue?

You could go through the code, disable plugins and even reinstall the CMS software, but these solutions could create downtime and root-cause analysis could still come up with nothing. Instead of tediously combing through web application code and plugins, CloudLinux PHP X-Ray lets you monitor and diagnose performance in CMS applications such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal without affecting uptime.

After the PHP X-Ray feature BETA release in CloudLinux OS+ many of our customers requested the same tool for their end-users to be able to scan their website and identify performance bottlenecks in case of a slow website or another issue. So we are happy to announce a new PHP X-Ray App that end-users of web hosting services can use from web-interface

What Does PHP X-Ray for End-users Do?

Performance issues can stem from several factors -- sluggish and poorly optimized plugins, slow database queries, code functionality, external calls to slow APIs, or possibly spikes in website traffic. PHP X-Ray offers tracing tools that easily plug into your end-users' CMS and analyzes the site to help them identify the root cause.

Here is how the tool works:

1. End user has to create a tracing task in PHP X-Ray.
2. Specify the site URLs or domains that have performance issues.
3. Visit the site and perform an action. For instance, submit a form on the site to perform a POST request, which will trigger PHP X-Ray data collection.
4. Return to tracing dashboard to review feedback. PHP X-Ray sorts requests by order of the slowest requests at the top so that you can prioritize issues.
5. View the Details page to get additional information about the performance issue and feedback on the root cause. For instance, if a WordPress plugin uses extensive resources for the request, you will find the details on this page.
6. Disable the plugin in the CMS administrative dashboard.
7. Revisit the site, and performance should improve. The Details page in the trace dashboard should also show no performance issue. 

After running a PHP X-Ray trace, end-user can drill down to their site and identify the exact plugin or other issue causing performance degradation. In just a few minutes, site owners managing a CMS website can identify performance issues without the overhead of traditional root-cause analysis.

For Administrators:

The beta for PHP X-Ray Admin was so popular, our testers asked for an end-user version that supports their CMS-based websites. We’ve released a new end-user PHP X-Ray version that can be used for individual CMS websites that runs as an installed plugin.

To install the plugin, follow these steps:

• To install from beta via SSH, run the following command:

• To update from beta via SSH, run the following command:

# yum update lvemanager alt-php-xray --enablerepo=cloudlinux-updates-testing

For any administrators familiar with the LVE Manager, the admin interface has one additional change: an additional checkbox in the User Interface of LVE Manager in → Options tab → Setting tab. The “Hide the PHP X-ray app in web-interface” is checked by default and must be unchecked to allow end-users to access the trace dashboard:

The end user sees the following interface:

As you can see in the image above, the end user can trace multiple domains and subdomains, view the status of their trace, set the IP to check, set the number of requests to collect, and set a timeframe for collection. End-user traces are limited to one trace at a time, and end users cannot see admin traces.

For instance, an end user can see a list of traces on database queries:

To test out PHP X-Ray with a free trial, visit our product page.