This looks like a good add. I'll do some more checking later, after PHP 7 support is out and stable.

I have (finally) had another look at this, but I can't see how I can make it nest depending on function. It doesn't seem that there is a way to show dependencies with this.

If you could make me a JSON file, accompanying a script, of how the tracer would/could visualise a run of a PHP script, then I'm happy to look at this again.

Are you still interested in this gekkie?

@derick, thanks for looking into this! (lost my credentials for a while hence the long delay in my response)

Since my original request things have changed and the need for replacing webgrind has diminished somewhat. (although i still believe in the usefullness to have flamegraphs of PHP processes)

But to answer your question the format for 'nested' calls would be this:
{ ..., "ts": 1.0, "tid": 1, "ph": "B", "name": "A"},
{ ..., "ts": 1.1, "tid": 1, "ph": "B", "name": "Asub"},
{ ..., "ts": 3.9, "tid": 1, "ph": "E"},
{ ..., "ts": 4.0, "tid": 1, "ph": "E"}

This seems to follow the ftrace format in that it's more about timings of events (function calls in php i guess?) than for individual memory usage increases etc...

right?

If anything, i thougth this might have been usefull to visualize the duration / weight of a PHP execution at that time. Since then, with the launch of i.e. blackfire.io this might be less usefull ?

Better does something like this work:

[
{ "pid": 1, "ts": 1.0, "dur": 15, "tid": 1, "ph": "X", "name": "A"},
{ "pid": 1, "ts": 3.1, "dur": 5, "tid": 1, "ph": "X", "name": "Asub", "args": { "1" : "fasdf" } },
{ "pid": 1, "ts": 10.3, "dur": 1, "tid": 1, "ph": "X", "name": "Bsub" },
{ "pid": 1, "ts": 4.1, "dur": 2.55, "tid": 1, "ph": "X", "name": "Csub", "args": { "1" : "fasdf" } },
{ "pid": 1, "ts": 9.1, "dur": 0.5, "tid": 1, "ph": "X", "name": "Asub", "args": { "1" : "fasdf" } }
]

Is this issue still relevant to you?

Thanks for the reminder, since then we've moved more and more to Blackfire (and other) forms of tracing and insight. Thus that mitigates the need (for us atleast) to have XDebug also include such features / functionality.

Thanks again for your great work!

Thanks. I'll close this one for now then. If this ever becomes an issue in the future, feel free to make a new issue.