PHP agent release notesRSS

Notes

This release of the New Relic PHP agent adds two major new features, and includes several important bug fixes and stability improvements. The new features are:

• Key Transaction Support, and
• Real User Monitoring improvements.

Key transactions (discussed here) allow you to mark transactions that are important to your specific business needs and can have their own Apdex settings and error metrics.

The Real User Monitoring (RUM) improvements allow you to link select transaction traces with browser traces. Other improvements include the ability for RUM to work with multiple application names, and delivery of the RUM JavaScript file will only use the https protocol if the main page was also delivered via https. The new newrelic_set_user_attributes() API call can now also be used to add additional data to browser traces. Please see this page for details.

The following smaller improvements and bug fixes have been made:

• Fixed an agent segmentation fault that occurred during Slow SQL processing at the end of a transaction.
• Fixed a daemon segmentation fault that occurred if the agent communication with the daemon was interrupted for any reason.
• Fixed a memory leak in the agent when the maximum number of Slow SQL statements for a transaction was reached.
• Fixed an error that was preventing the daemon from re-spawning a copy of itself if the worker daemon died due to a segmentation fault.
• Updated the newrelic_set_appname API call to no longer send the transaction thus far to the daemon unless you give it an argument explicitly requesting this behavior. This considerably reduces the overhead of changing application names on the fly.
• Updated the newrelic_end_transaction API call to allow you to decide whether or not the transaction should be sent to the daemon. It is by default.
• Fixed an error in the installer script where the license key was not being inserted into the INI file correctly.
• Functions with custom instrumentation (newrelic.transaction_tracer.custom) will now produce metrics that can be used in custom dashboards.
• If your application produces a Content-Length header, automatic RUM ("auto-RUM") will no longer inject the RUM header and footer, which would invalidate the content length calculated by your application.
• The NR_INSTALL_KEY environment variable is now correctly obeyed.
• The daemon is now compiled to support showing a backtrace in the event of a segmentation violation.

Notes

This release marks the start of a brand new series of PHP agent releases. This represents many months of performance tuning, stability improvements and additional new features. All existing users are highly encouraged to upgrade to the latest agent. There are many changes in this version, the most interesting of which are listed below. All users who are upgrading from a previous release are encouraged to read the upgrade notes document to fully understand some of the impacts of upgrading.

Highlights of this release include:

• Drastic memory usage reduction. The agent overhead is down from approximately 35% to just 4%.
• Significantly less stack space used (down from 40K per PHP function call to just 84 bytes). This affects users with deeply recursive functions.
• License keys are now set in the INI file and not the daemon configuration file, and they are settable on a per-directory or per-virtual host basis. This very frequently requested feature will allow multi-tenant sites to use different keys for each tenant.
• The New Relic daemon can now be started automatically by the agent. For upgrade customers it will still be started the way it always was with the init scripts, but you can now change that by configuring the daemon in your INI file. Please see this page on daemon startup modes for details.
• Several bugs related to auto-RUM (Real User Monitoring) have been fixed, including a fix for non-standard HTML (where the head element is at the end of the document).
• The agent startup "banner" now contains much more useful information that can be included in the initial dialog with support, and will short-circuit the typical "what OS and PHP version are you using exactly?" preamble to getting a ticket resolved.
• The agent and daemon no longer use a UNIX-domain socket for their communications. Now a standard TCP socket (port 33142 by default) is used, which makes deploying in a chroot environment a lot easier.
• The RPM and Debian packages have been split into three separate packages: the agent, the daemon and common scripts between the two. This was primarily done so that the agent was in its own package, and on 64-bit systems the agent package now only contains the 64-bit agent. This means that 64-bit users do not have to install the entire 32-bit runtime just to install the PHP agent. The 32-bit agent can always be installed alongside the 64-bit one.
• The phpinfo() output has been changed to more clearly distinguish between global and per-directory settings. It now also correctly displays the per-directory value if the script was invoked from within a directory that changed default values.
• The newrelic.transaction_tracer.top100 setting has been renamed to newrelic.transaction_tracer.detail.
• You can now arbitrarily begin and end transactions (for example, at the beginning and end of each job queue unit of work). This is done using the new newrelic_end_transaction and newrelic_start_transaction API calls.
• The daemon has been considerably simplified and uses fewer locks, thus reducing the potential for entering a "spin" state.
• Many other improvements to speed and stability.

Notes:

This is a very minor patch release to the 2.9 series of PHP agent. It contains only 1 small fix which only affects customers who use more than 1024 Apache worker processes:

• Added missing ulimit command to daemon startup script to correctly set the maximum number of open file descriptors that the daemon can handle, in case the system default is too low.

Notes:

• Added support as an external service for HttpRequest::Send
• Added limited support for curl_multi_exec. This will now show up as an external services call but will not provide insight as to how many or which web sites were handled by the function.
• CakePHP transaction naming considerably improved
• The daemon and agent now support up to 2048 file descriptors (up from 1024 on Linux). This is most relevant to larger sites that have > 1024 Apache worker processes.
• The daemon behaves better if the maximum number of open file descriptors is exceeded.
• The Debian installer no longer changes the permissions of the log directory if the system administrator had changed them. Also, if the log directory didnt exist (first time installation) default the ownership of the directory to the Apache user and group, if Apache is installed.
• SQL parser fix to avoid being confused by the words "from" or "into" appearing in table names.

Notes:

• Considerably more detailed transaction traces, reducing to almost nil the amount of "uninstrumented time" in TT graphs.
• Detailed TT's (the so-called "top100" feature) are now enabled by default.
• Reduced the overhead for detailed TT's dramatically, bringing it to within 2-3% of the agent speed without them enabled.
• Fixed a memory bug that was causing garbage metric names to be sent to the daemon and then on to RPM.
• Fixed erroneous behavior of the "newrelic_end_of_transaction()" API call. Previously it did not correctly end the transaction.
• The fix to reduce metric grouping issues with WordPress table names no longer causes the table names to produce a warning in the logfile.

Notes:

• Updated to work with Apache 2.4
• The auto-RUM buffer is now erasable, but doing so will obviously prevent auto-RUM from inserting the RUM header and/or footer.
• Fixed a problem where WordPress blogs would result in metric explosion due to their database table naming scheme
• Support transactions that last longer than 35 minutes. Long-running cron jobs will no longer report negative time.

Notes:

• Support for PHP 5.4RC8 or higher. Please note that versions prior to RC8 will not work correctly, especially not with auto-RUM. Also please heed the advice that the PHP developers themselves give about using the 5.4 release candidates: do not use it in production.
• Added the frequently-requested newrelic_set_appname() API that will allow you to change the name of the application on the fly. This should be called as early as possible, and cannot be called after the RUM footer has been sent.
• Fixed an occasional segmentation violation caused by the Slow SQL feature, especially when using the command line version of PHP.
• Fixed an occasional segmentation violation caused by auto-RUM.
• Fixed a problem where the ZTS-enabled version of the agent would cause a segmentation violation when used on the command line.
• Removed the colon from the list of characters that are invalid in SQL table names, and provide a mechanism to disable table name checking completely.
• Fixed a small (about 10 bytes per request) memory leak.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause PHP execution time to not show up in the application overview graph.
• If you call the newrelic_ignore_transaction() API function, no longer produce automatic RUM headers and footers for that transaction.

Notes:

• Fixed an issue where using file_get_contents() could end up being mis-interpreted as an SQL node and cause a core-dump. This would only happen when Slow-SQL traces were enabled.

Notes:

• Fixed several issues that would cause Apache to core-dump. Not all users would see these faults, but a few did and those bugs have been fixed.
• Removed support for the PHP-only MediaWiki memcached client that was added in 2.6.5.41, as the code that was added to support this was part of what was causing random core dumps. It will be re-added in a future release.
• Use less system stack space when hooking PHP functions so that PHP code that is massively recursive runs less risk of overflowing the stack.
• Corrected the way the Mac OSX client was being built so it works on OSX 10.5.
• Fixed a potential buffer over-run error in the Zend and Magento framework code that would be provoked if a controller name was significantly longer than the module name.
• Removed the backslash from the list of illegal characters in SQL table names as some customers actually use it.
• Prevent a file descriptor leak if you do a soft restart of Apache.