Profiling PHP Applications with Xdebug

In this episode, joined by Derick Rethans, we take a look at Xdebug and how it help you profile your PHP applications, allowing you to use a profiling front-end, like qcachegrind, to visualise your call graphs and dig into the bottlenecks of your applications.

Xdebug is an extension for PHP to assist with debugging and development.

- It contains a single step debugger to use with IDEs
- It upgrades PHP's var_dump() function
- It adds stack traces for Notices, Warnings, Errors and Exceptions
- It features functionality for recording every function call and variable assignment to disk
- It contains a profiler
- It provides code coverage functionality for use with PHPUnit


🕰 Timeline

00:00 - Holding Screen
01:55 - Introductions
06:30 - What are we going to profile?
11:30 - Installing and enabling Xdebug extension with Pecl
17:40 - Profiling our hello-world example
28:20 - Profiling our factorial example
46:20 - Profiling our simple composer configuration
57:30 - Profiling our complex composer configuration
1:09:00 - Compiling Xdebug 3 for the performance gains!
1:13:00 - Profiling our complex composer configuration with much gains


🌎 Links

Derick Rethans - https://twitter.com/derickr
Xdebug - https://xdebug.org/