statgrab

A native PHP extension wrapping libstatgrab, the cross-platform system-statistics library. Originally released to PECL in 2006 against libstatgrab 0.6; the 2.0.0 line is a full modernization for the PHP 8.0+ era against libstatgrab 0.92+.

Supports PHP 8.0 through 8.5 on glibc Linux, musl, macOS, and *BSD.

The Problem

Reading system stats from PHP usually means one of three bad options:

• Shell out to top, vmstat, df, ps and parse the output. Fragile on every OS update, and fork/exec overhead adds up if you poll on a schedule.
• Read /proc by hand. Linux-only. Forces hand-rolled regex for every statistic, and the format drifts between kernel releases.
• Pull in a heavy monitoring framework. Overkill if all you need is a CPU number for a health endpoint.

libstatgrab is the right primitive: cross-platform, well-tested, in the package manager of every modern Unix. But the 2006 PECL binding has not shipped a PHP 8 build, and its 2006 BC quirks (stringified counters, swapped page-stat keys, a flat name_list for users) made the old extension awkward even when you could compile it.

✨ Key Features

Feature	Notes
Cross-platform	glibc Linux, musl, macOS, FreeBSD
Procedural + OO API	2006 sg_* function names preserved; modern Statgrab class on top
Bundled libstatgrab option	Vendored 0.92.1 with a leak-fix patch; resulting .so has no runtime dependency on libstatgrab.so
Modern types	Counters returned as 64-bit int, not stringified numbers
Modern PHP errors	E_WARNING on library failure, ArgumentCountError for arg-count violations
BC-preserved 2006 names	Drop-in for callers of the original PECL extension, with the 2.0 BC notes documented below

⚖️ Why native

The case for a native extension is the failure modes of the alternatives:

• exec("top ...") and friends fork a process per call. The overhead is real if you poll every few seconds, and the output format drifts between OS releases.
• Hand-parsing /proc ties you to Linux and to whatever the kernel decided to print this year. Each file (/proc/meminfo, /proc/loadavg, /proc/diskstats, /proc/net/dev) has its own format and edge cases.
• Calling out to a stats daemon adds a network hop and a daemon to deploy.

statgrab calls libstatgrab in-process. libstatgrab handles the per-OS path (Linux /proc, FreeBSD kvm, macOS host_* APIs) and exposes a single typed surface. The extension wraps that surface with no allocation per call beyond the result array.

🚀 Quick Start

PIE (recommended on PHP 8.x)

PIE is the PHP Foundation's PECL successor. It installs from Packagist, builds against the active php-config, and produces a loadable .so. Make sure libstatgrab is installed first (see the From-source section below for the system package names), then:

pie install iliaal/statgrab

Then add extension=statgrab to your php.ini.

PECL

The package remains in the PECL channel for legacy installers:

pecl install statgrab

From source

sudo apt install libstatgrab-dev   # Debian/Ubuntu
# OR: brew install libstatgrab     # macOS
# OR: pkg install libstatgrab      # FreeBSD

phpize
./configure --with-statgrab
make
sudo make install

Then add extension=statgrab to your php.ini.

config.m4 resolves libstatgrab through pkg-config first; if that fails it falls back to a path probe (/usr and /usr/local). Pass --with-statgrab=<prefix> to point at a custom install.

Bundled libstatgrab (statically linked, leak-fixed)

The repo carries a vendored copy of libstatgrab 0.92.1 under vendor/libstatgrab/ with one local patch (see vendor/libstatgrab/LOCAL_PATCHES.md) that fixes a process-exit leak upstream hasn't released yet. To use it:

(cd vendor/libstatgrab && ./configure --enable-static --disable-shared --without-ncurses --with-pic && make)
phpize
./configure --with-statgrab=bundled
make

The resulting .so has no libstatgrab.so runtime dependency.

The vendored libstatgrab tree stays LGPL 2.1+ (see LICENSE.libstatgrab); the extension code stays PHP-3.01 (see LICENSE). Dynamic-link or static-link, neither license infects the other.

API

Procedural

The 2006 function names are preserved.

sg_cpu_percent_usage(): array|false       // user/kernel/idle/iowait/swap/nice (%)
sg_cpu_totals(): array|false              // cumulative jiffies + ctx switches/syscalls/IRQs
sg_cpu_diff(): array|false                // jiffies since last call
sg_diskio_stats(): array|false            // [diskname => [read, written, time_frame]]
sg_diskio_stats_diff(): array|false
sg_fs_stats(): array|false                // mounted filesystems with size/used/inodes/...
sg_general_stats(): array|false           // os_name, hostname, uptime, ncpus, ...
sg_load_stats(): array|false              // min1, min5, min15
sg_memory_stats(): array|false            // total, free, used, cache (bytes)
sg_swap_stats(): array|false              // total, free, used (bytes)
sg_network_stats(): array|false           // [ifname => sent/received/packets/...]
sg_network_stats_diff(): array|false
sg_page_stats(): array|false              // pages_in, pages_out (cumulative)
sg_page_stats_diff(): array|false
sg_process_count(): array|false           // total, running, sleeping, stopped, zombie
sg_process_stats(?int $sort = null, int $limit = 0): array|false
sg_user_stats(): array|false              // [{login_name, device, pid, login_time, ...}]
sg_network_iface_stats(): array|false     // [ifname => {speed, duplex, active}]

Object-oriented

$sg = new Statgrab();
$sg->cpu();
$sg->host();
$sg->memory();
$sg->processes(Statgrab::SORT_CPU, 10);
$sg->disks(diff: true);

Class constants:

• Statgrab::DUPLEX_FULL | DUPLEX_HALF | DUPLEX_UNKNOWN
• Statgrab::SORT_NAME | PID | UID | GID | SIZE | RES | CPU | TIME
• Statgrab::STATE_RUNNING | SLEEPING | STOPPED | ZOMBIE | UNKNOWN

The SG_* global constants from 2006 are still defined for BC.

Errors

Library-side errors emit E_WARNING with the libstatgrab error string and code, and the function returns false. The OO surface follows the same convention. Argument-count violations on no-arg functions throw ArgumentCountError per modern PHP convention.

Notable 2.0 BC breaks

• sg_user_stats() returns per-user records, not a flat array of usernames. The underlying name_list field was removed from libstatgrab 0.91+. Migrate callers to read login_name from each record.
• Numeric counters (memory totals, fs sizes, jiffies) are returned as int instead of stringified numbers. The 2006 release stringified via snprintf("%lld") because 32-bit PHP couldn't hold them; modern 64-bit zend_long does.
• sg_page_stats() / sg_page_stats_diff() were swapped in 2006 and are now correct.
• sg_process_stats() fields gid and egid are now distinct from uid and euid (2006 had a copy-paste bug returning uid/euid for both).

See CHANGELOG.md for the full list.

🔗 PHP Performance Toolkit

Native PHP extensions for the kinds of work pure-PHP libraries handle slowly:

• php_excel: Excel I/O via LibXL.
• mdparser: CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown via cmark-gfm.
• php_clickhouse: native ClickHouse client via clickhouse-cpp.

License

PHP License 3.01.

---

Follow @iliaa on X • Blog

If this saved you from parsing /proc by hand, ⭐ star it!