Andreas Gohr has a new blog post today that talks about a way to really get to know your code better - use XDebug to see it from the inside out.

Xdebug is a PHP extension which helps you to understand, debug and profile PHP. It can help you to find bottlenecks or give you an quick overview what happens in code you aren't familiar with, yet.

The post gives a brief overview of the installation of the extension (building a shared module) and shows how to get started with profiling an application. He talks about the cachegrind tool you can use to parse the results and the kcachegrind app that will make the results a bit more visual.

As a bonus, he also throws in a bit about function tracing - picking out each small bit of functionality in the code (the function/methods) and gathering stats for each.

The xml.it blog passes on a quick tip for something that was exactly what they were looking for:

We were looking for a simple open-source PHP profiler, without any fancy IDEs like Zend bundled together. After a little search, we found one: Xdebug, debugger and profiler tool for PHP.

XDebug is "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 traces, memory allocation and protection for infinite recursions".