I'm working on a piece of PHP-code, and I need to examine if there are any bottlenecks in it. It's not much code, about 170 lines, but there are quite some includes, object instantations, conditions, etcetera, and I can't easily oversee if there's anything that might cause a web server's load to rise too much if this particular piece of code gets executed hundreds of times a second (I know that that is certainly going to happen).

So, what do I do? I do a quick check: do I have any debuggers or profilers running in the background which I can use to learn about this code? And I find there's a Zend Debugger present, because I run a development version of Zend Platform.

Using get_extension_funcs() I know that the debugger has six functions I maybe could use, but I don't know what they do. Can they give me some useful information? I don't know. So I just call the functions to try them out. Nothing of use comes of it. So I decide to look up some documentation on these six functions.

Nothing on PHP.net. Nothing on Zend.com. Nothing on weblogs where Zend Debugger is mentioned. Nothing on forums. Nowhere can I find documentation on how to use Zend Debugger from my code. Doesn't anyone use the debugger? Is it only meant for use in Zend Platform and IDE's like the Eclipse PDT thing?

Does anyone know?