Sebastian Bergmann as a new post talking about a few of the features of the PHPUnit unit testing framework, especially test isolation.

Some of PHPUnit features come with the cost of a performance penality. This posting explores the effect of the --no-syntax-check, $backupGlobals = FALSE;, and --coverage-html options.

He compares benchmarks for a test with few different settings - $GLOBALS, syntax check and code coverage (including graphical output of the execution times on the various parts of the tests).