Glossary

Call-Graph
A call-graph is a relational visualization method. Blackfire profiles are displayed as call-graphs to show the caller-callee relation between the function/method calls, which shows best the code's behavior. It enables for instance to understand whether a specific function call is responsible for a bottleneck, or if the bottleneck comes from their parents.
Callee
A callee is a function/method which is called by another function/method in your code.
Caller
A caller is a function/method which calls another function/method in your code.
CPU Time
The CPU Time is a profiling dimension in Blackfire. It corresponds to the time your server's CPU spends executing your code.
Exclusive Time
The Exclusive Time is the time spent to execute a function, excluding the time spent executing its callees. The exclusive time tells you which functions consumed the most time by themselves; those are probably the ones you might want to optimize first.
Extended Trace
Extended Traces are a small subset of Monitoring Traces for which Blackfire collects more in-depth metrics, such as Spans.
Inclusive Time
The Inclusive Time is the time spent to execute a function, including all of the callees.
I/O Time
The I/O time corresponds to the time that the CPU is waiting for input/output operations. That can for instance correspond to network (database calls, Redis calls, HTTP calls, ...) or disk activity (file inclusions, ...). Keep in mind that in Blackfire profiles the I/O is rarely 0 as it also includes non-significant activities like memory access.
Node
A node is a call-graph element. In Blackfire, it represents a function/method call, or an aggregation of calls.
Organization
An Organization enables to have multiple projects with different subscription levels. They give more flexibility for companies working on several projects in parallel to tune the number of users and environments for each project, the subscription level, and the billing cycle.
Percentile
The value below which a percentage of data falls. Having a 96th percentile Response Time of 50ms means that 96% of the transactions have a response time below or equal to 50ms.
Profile
A profile is the data output while measuring the resource consumption of an executed piece of code. In Blackfire, that includes consumption in Wall-time, CPU time, I/O time, Memory, Network, HTTP calls, and SQL queries. Profiles are the largest level of data collected.
Pruning
Part of the data preprocessing done by Blackfire involves removing function calls that take less than 1% of the global costs on all dimensions (time, CPU, memory, etc.). This is done to reduce the size of the profiles and to provide a responsive UI. You won't be able to find these removed nodes in the call graph nor in the functions list. Pruning can be disabled for debugging purposes.
Span
A Span is the representation of a function call over time within Blackfire Monitoring. Collecting Spans may generate additional overhead on Extended Traces.
Sub-Profile
A sub-profile is a regular profile that is linked to the main profile or to one or several other sub-profiles. Sub-profiles are part of the Distributed Profiling feature.
Trace
Blackfire Monitoring relies on Monitoring Traces, the lightest level of data it collects. This is the minimal amount of data gathered for all parts of the monitored application and at whichever desired frequency.
Wall-Time
The wall time for a function call is the measure of the real time it took to execute the code. It’s the difference between the time at which the function was entered and the time at which the function was left. It is the sum of CPU time + I/O time.