Posted by Jochem Maas on 01/15/05 11:29

Greg Donald wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 18:47:14 +0100, Jochem Maas <jochem@iamjochem.com> wrote:
>
>>in addition there is the xdebug extension by Derick Rethans its at
>>version 2 but I might suggest starting with 1.3 as its alot simpler to
>>use than 2 (then again if you have experience of things like
>>valgrind/dbg on linux you should have little problems).
>
>
> I just don't see the need. PHP explodes right on the screen for me.
> I can usually find and fix an error in a few seconds of seeing it in
> my browser or in my terminal. Lines numbers always accompany the
> error messages, and you can even go the extra mile and link the error
> messages back into the PHP manual for faster lookups when required.

actually I agree with you when it come to bug hunting/fixing. especially
with PHP5 and the nice stacktraces you get as part of an Exception.

but (there always a 'but' hey!)...

where I found xdebug to be very handy is in code profiling. - it helped
me shave 30% (time) per request in a (way too!) generic data editing
framework I wrote with a friend of mine. (we run it on a slow test
server and some of the _really_ heavy pages were taking 10-15 seconds to
display - 40,000 calls to strtolower()!!! for instance - and that wasn't
even the 'bad' part).

thats also the reason I mentioned going for xdebug1.3x - it lets you
basically dump different kinds of profiling info onto the screen in HTML
format (or into a file for later viewing) where as xdebug 2.x requires
using something like cachegrind to analyse the data - which is little
over my head to just setup and go (i.e. too much effort to figure it out
right now :-).

I haven't even look at the actually debugger functionality of xdebug!

so I reckon its overkill for most people - but nice to know its there if
you ever need it.

>
> Granted if you have a long running PHP app that's acting funky then
> you might want to analyze it in more depth.. but at that point you
> gotta ask yourself should you even be using PHP for the task at hand?
> Could this task or even part of the task be better handled better with
> another language?
>
>

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