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A sampling profiler or a memory usage profiler for PHP written in PHP, which reads information about running PHP VM from outside the process. You can find performance bottlenecks or memory leaks of your scripts without changing the target script or loading extensions.

526 starsPHP

Reli – a sampling profiler and VM state inspector for PHP

by sji·Apr 30, 2026·2 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryNiche GemSolve My Problem

Reads PHP VM memory from outside the process with zero code changes.

Strengths
  • •Written in PHP itself, avoiding native extension compilation headaches.
  • •Live hot-frames feed updates in real-time via simple watch commands.
  • •Memory graph analysis detects leaks without restarting the target script.
Weaknesses
  • •PHP-specific scope limits audience compared to universal profilers.
  • •Complex CLI output may overwhelm developers used to GUI tools.
Target Audience

PHP backend developers, performance engineers

Similar To

Xdebug · Blackfire · Spyce

Post Description

I showed an earlier version of this here a bit over two years ago. Since then, Reli has grown a lot.

Reli is a sampling profiler and VM state inspector for PHP, written in PHP, that inspects running PHP processes from the outside.

In 0.12.0, tracing, memory analysis, monitoring, and runtime inspection all expanded quite a bit.

I would be especially interested in feedback on whether the memory-analysis, watch, and variable-inspection direction looks useful.

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