If you’ve been looking for a way to help debug and profile your PHP code, you will want to check out Xdebug. While this isn’t something new, it is an area that many people are unfamiliar with and are unaware that such a tool exists. This is a tool that any serious PHP developer needs in their tool belt. If you are at all concerned about performance of your PHP scripts, the profiler alone in Xdebug is worth checking out.

From the web site:

The Xdebug extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information. The debug information that Xdebug can provide includes the following:

• stack and function traces in error messages with:


• full parameter display for user defined functions


• function name, file name and line indications


• support for member functions


• memory allocation


• protection for infinite recursions

Xdebug also provides:

• profiling information for PHP scripts


• script execution analysis


• capabilities to debug your scripts interactively with a debug client

Xdebug is also available as a PECL package.