Monitor Code Processing Time in PHP with Time Warden

Published on May 30th, 2024 by Paul Redmond

Time Warden is a lightweight PHP library that enables you to monitor the processing time of tasks and take actions on thresholds exceeding defined execution time limits. It's probably best illustrated with an example from the readme:

timeWarden()->task('Checking articles')->start();
 
foreach ($articles as $article) {
    // Perform long process... 🕒
}
 
// Using traditional anonymous function
timeWarden()->stop(static function (Task $task): void {
    $task->onExceedsMilliseconds(500, static function (Task $task): void {
        // Do what you need, for example, send an email 🙂
        Mail::to('foo@bar.com')->queue(
            new SlowArticleProcess($task)
        );
    });
});
 
// Or using an arrow function
timeWarden()->stop(static function (Task $task): void {
    $task->onExceedsMilliseconds(500, fn (Task $task) => Log::error($task->name.' has taken too long'));
});

This library has excellent documentation in the project's readme, which in summary offers the following features:

Monitor processing time of critical tasks in development and debugging
Reactive actions when time is exceeded (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, and hours)
Execution time debugging output
Measure execution time of an individual task and groups of tasks
Framework-agnostic library you can use with Laravel, Symfony, standalone, etc.
PHP 8.2+

I like the output of tasks, which you can output directly or through a logging system:

 
echo timeWarden()->output();
/*
╔═════════════════════ TIMEWARDEN ═════╤═══════════════╗
║ GROUP               │ TASK           │ DURATION (MS) ║
╠═════════════════════╪════════════════╪═══════════════╣
║ default (320.37 ms) │ Articles task  │ 70.23         ║
║                     │ Customers task │ 250.14        ║
╚══════════════════ Total: 320.37 ms ══╧═══════════════╝
*/
 
// Send as a log
if (app()->environment('local')) {
    Log::debug(timeWarden()->output());
}