Phpray MCP server

PHPRay

Every PHP request, recorded. Find out which plugin, which query, and since when.

PHPRay is always-on request tracing for PHP. It records wall time, CPU, memory, SQL, outbound HTTP, errors and N+1 patterns for every request, not a sample, and on a small share of requests it adds a per-plugin / per-component time breakdown.

It is a PHP extension plus a local collector. No agent that needs root, no network egress from the PHP process, no SaaS account required. It runs on shared hosting (CageFS, LiteSpeed lsphp, mod_php), on a VPS and in containers, on PHP 8.0–8.5, glibc and musl, amd64 and arm64.

curl -fsSL https://phpray.dev/install.sh -o phpray-install.sh
less phpray-install.sh          # it asks for root; read it first
sudo bash phpray-install.sh && phpray top

What it looks like

PHPRay Cloud: every site, then one site, then one 887 ms request broken into PHP and database time, the plugins that spent it, and the queries behind it. Demo data.

The question it answers

"The store got slow last week" is not actionable. PHPRay turns it into a named plugin, a named query and the day it changed:

Why another profiler

PHPRay writes one record per request, so the single failing checkout and the error that fired once are still there when you look.

• Every request, not a sample. Sampling agents keep statistics between samples.

48 ms, tracing with the function observer off could not be separated from the baseline across five interleaved rounds; with the observer on, the default today, the page took 50 ms. Method, raw numbers and caveats: the benchmark. Xdebug instruments every function call, which is why you only turn it on deliberately.

• Cheap enough to leave on, and we measured it. On a WordPress page rendering in

requests by default. Measuring every call of every request on production traffic would cost more than the traffic itself. Note the honest catch: the observer that makes this possible is registered for every request, which is where the 2 ms above comes from. Set phpray.profile_functions=0 if you want the cheapest possible always-on layer and turn the breakdown on only when investigating.

• The expensive part is sampled on purpose. Per-function profiling runs on 3 % of

system resources, no agent binary. The extension talks to a local collector over shared memory or a flat file. If your host lets you edit your own php.ini — cPanel MultiPHP INI Editor, CloudLinux PHP Selector, Plesk — you can point extension= at a .so in your home directory and run the collector as your own user. No root, no compiler, nobody's permission. Verified end to end as uid 1000; the cases where it does not work are listed in the docs.

• Built for shared hosting, and you can install it yourself. No daemon owning

Who builds it

Built by IQhost, a European hosting provider running PHP for thousands of sites. That is where PHPRay is developed and where it is deployed first: the shared-hosting constraints in this README are not hypothetical, they are the environment the extension has to survive in every day.

Ask an agent what is slow

PHPRay ships an MCP server, so a coding agent can read your traces and answer "which plugin is slowing this page down" without you opening a dashboard.

Try it with nothing installed and no account — you get a read-only demo account with a real WooCommerce store's recorded traffic:

claude mcp add --transport http phpray https://phpray.dev/mcp

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.