PHP agent release notesRSS

Notes

End of Life Notices

• This release no longer supports BSD (either 32-bit or 64-bit) or the 32-bit variant of Mac OS X.

New Features

• Add Laravel 4.0 support

  Laravel version 4.0 or greater is now supported natively. The naming scheme that we use follows the scheme developed by Patrick Leckey at Intouch Insight, and we are very grateful for his assistance.

  If you are already using the LaravelNewrelicServiceProvider from https://packagist.org/packages/intouch/laravel-newrelic then we recommend removing that from the list of service providers, and relying on our native support instead.

  However, if you are using the custom naming mechanism with 'name_provider' from the intouch/laravel-newrelic package, then those transaction names will take precedence over our automatically generated transaction names. If you do use 'name_provider', please write us and let us know what your namer does so we might extend our built in capabilities.

Bug Fixes

• Improved real user monitoring Javascript insertion.

  The real user monitoring Javascript loader will now be injected after any meta charset tag, ensuring that the meta charset tag is close to the beginning of the page.

  The real user monitoring Javascript footer will no longer be inserted into HTML comments or nested HTML iframes.

• Properly observe newrelic.ignored_params when capturing the request's URL.

  If newrelic.capture_params is true then the agent will capture the values within the $_REQUEST parameter and the full raw URL of the request. The contents of newrelic.ignored_params are used to selectively ignore values from $_REQUEST. The presence of newrelic.ignored_params will now also prevent the capturing of query parameters in the request URL.

• Fix transaction naming when newrelic.webtransaction.name.functions is present.

  When newrelic.webtransaction.name.functions had a non-empty value, the URL was being used as the default web transaction name instead of the PHP filename.

• Print backtrace to log file in the event of a segmentation fault.

  This functionality has been missing since release 4.4.

Notes

We're happy to announce the availability of version 4.5.5.38 of the New Relic PHP Agent, featuring Drupal 8 instrumentation. More details below.

End of Life Notices

• This release no longer supports any backdoor exceptions to run threaded Apache MPM. PHP itself is unstable in this environment.
• This is the last release of the PHP agent for BSD (either 32-bit or 64-bit.)
• This is the last release for the 32-bit variants of Mac OSX. 64-bit Mac OSX will still be supported.
• This release no longer ships with any backdoor support for PHP 5.1.

New Features

• Experimental Drupal 8 support

  Drupal 8 is now supported by the PHP agent's framework detection code. This support should be considered "experimental" given the pre-release nature of Drupal 8. Drupal 8 applications will have their transactions named correctly, and will also generate the same module, hook and view metrics as Drupal 6 and 7 applications. This support can be forced by setting the newrelic.framework configuration setting to drupal8 if auto-detection fails.

Upgrade Notices

• All customers running on old x86 hardware that does not support the SSE3 instruction set (such as early releases of the AMD Opteron) should upgrade to this release as soon as possible. Prior to this release, the daemon inadvertently contained SSE3 instructions which would cause an illegal instruction on such hardware. The only way the SSE3 instructions were executed was when we changed the choice and priority of SSL cipher algorithms at our data center, and we would like to change those priorities by the end of 2Q2014.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with file_get_contents instrumentation.

  Fixed a bug which would cause the default context to be ignored by file_get_contents when a context parameter was not provided. This issue was causing customer API calls to fail in certain situations. The previous remedy was to disable cross-application tracing to work around the issue. This is now fixed.

Notes

This release of the New Relic PHP Agent improves real user monitoring and adds support for custom parameters in transaction analytics events. These changes were made to create a solid foundation for future enhancements. Additionally, an emphasis was placed on reducing the download size of the agent. As a result, the download size has been reduced by 75%.

New Features

• Improve Real User Monitoring

  The PHP agent's code for both automatic and manual injection of Real User Monitoring scripts has been improved. No application changes are required, but the new injection logic is simpler, faster, more robust, and paves the way for future improvements to Real User Monitoring.

• Attach custom parameters to analytics events

  Custom parameters given to the agent through the API functions newrelic_add_custom_parameter and newrelic_set_user_attributes can now be automatically attached to transaction and page view analytics events. By default custom parameters will be attached to traces, errors, and transaction analytics events. Optionally, custom parameters can also be included in the JavaScript injected for Real User Monitoring. This allows custom parameters to be attached to page view analytics events.

  The behavior of custom parameters can be controlled through the following configuration settings, which are shown with their default values.

  newrelic.transaction_tracer.capture_attributes = true newrelic.error_collector.capture_attributes = true newrelic.analytics_events.capture_attributes = true newrelic.browser_monitoring.capture_attributes = false

Notes

This release of the PHP agent automatically marks Drupal cron requests as background tasks, improves the categorization of PHP errors within the New Relic UI, and fixes several bugs. Additionally, the internals of the agent have been significantly refactored to improve the stability and performance of the agent.

New Features

• Treat Drupal cron requests as background tasks

  Drupal cron requests (identified by calls to drupal_cron_run()) will now be counted as background tasks (not web transactions) regardless of how they are started. Previously, it was necessary to use the newrelic_background_job() API to explicitly mark Drupal cron requests as background tasks.

• Use the exception class as the category for errors

  Errors created using the newrelic_notice_error() API function with an exception will be grouped according to the exception's class. Previously, all errors were grouped under 'NoticedError'.

  See https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/php/the-php-api#api-notice-error

• Limit the maximum number of nested PHP function calls

  The agent will now limit the maximum number of nested function calls within PHP applications. This is to provide protection against stack overflows due to infinite recursion. Previously, this would result in a segmentation fault. The agent will now log an error and terminate the process by raising a fatal PHP error. By default, this limit is set to a very high value of 500. Exceeding this limit should be extremely rare.

• Improve the stability and performance of the agent

  The internals of the agent and its background daemon process have been significantly refactored to improve interprocess communication, stability and performance. The maximum number of connections to the background daemon process has been doubled to 4096.

Bug Fixes

• Fix for installing on Ubuntu 13.10 when using PHP-FPM

  Previously the installer would fail to install a newrelic.ini file in the configuration directory for PHP-FPM (/etc/php5/fpm/conf.d), if one was present. This has been fixed, and the installer will correctly install a newrelic.ini for CLI, DSO and FPM configuration directories.

• Fix for drupal_http_request() always returning NULL under PHP 5.5

  Version 3.9.5.13 added support for external calls made using drupal_http_request(). Due to the way the agent instruments this function under PHP 5.5, this function would always return NULL instead of the correct return value. This has been fixed.

• Fix for real user monitoring when a Content-Length response header is present.

  When automatic real user monitoring is enabled, the agent will only perform JavaScript injection into HTML pages when a Content-Length header is not already present in the response. In some cases, this check was not working correctly leading to the value in the Content-Length header not matching the actual number of bytes sent to the client.

• Fixed a segmentation fault when Zend Thread Safety is enabled.

  Attempts to use the agent under Apache using a threaded MPM (e.g. worker or event) and mod_php would result in segmentation faults. This has been fixed, but New Relic does not recommend using the agent in these circumstances.

• Fixed high CPU usage under heavy load

  Under very high loads with thousands of PHP processes, the background daemon process could consume 100% CPU when the per-process file descriptor limit was exceeded. This has been fixed. The agent will now throttle the number of new connections accepted when per-process file descriptor limit is reached. A message is also printed to the log file.

Notes

• Fix a segfault that could occur when the daemon was unable to bind to its listening socket during startup. The watcher process would then attempt to spawn a new daemon process leading to another segfault creating a loop. This loop would then cause the daemon log file to grow indefinitely. All customers are encouraged to upgrade.

Notes

• We've added support for Symfony 2. Symfony 2 controller names will now show up in the web transactions view. This is an intermediate step leading up towards future Drupal 8 support.
• We have improved Zend Framework 1 transaction naming in order to reduce instances of metric grouping issues.
• We have tidied up our code for handling slow SQL statements.

Notes

• Transaction traces containing many consecutive calls to curl_multi_exec will now show the cumulative time as a single node. Previously the transaction trace would show one node for each call.
• We fixed segmentation faults when restarting Apache on Darwin and FreeBSD.
• We corrected an issue in the newest Debian-based Linux distributions that prevented the newrelic.ini file from being installed properly.
• A warning message is put in the agent log when newrelic_name_transaction() fails.

Notes

• Support for histograms and percentiles
• PHP 5.5 support added
• PHP 5.1 deprecated
• Various bug fixes and stability improvements.

Notes

Support for two additional external calls has been added to cross application tracing.

• Zend_Http_Client::request()
• drupal_http_request()