In my experience, Xdebug is not suited to the task. It has a big impact on the executed process, so profiling is slow and biased. The results need some extra pr

In my experience, Xdebug is not suited to the task. It has a big impact on the executed process, so profiling is slow and biased. The results need some extra processing to get interpreted, which is a pain when experimenting with code changes. It's been a long time since I last used Xdebug to profile anything, so maybe the situation is better now. My preferred tool is php-spx. Once the extension is loaded into PHP, within seconds you get a flamegraph of where time is spent. It's also easy to apply to command-line scripts. And it's versatile enough (with the right settings) to profile long-running or memory heavy scripts. https://github.com/NoiseByNorthwest/php-spx https://github.com/NoiseByNorthwest/php-spx SPX could be loaded with docker-compose like this article does for Xdebug. But if you already have a PHP environment, the easiest way to install it is to compile it (sudo apt install php-dev && make && cp modules/spx.so /usr/lib/php/....).