In a previous post I wrote about doing step by step debugging using Zend Debugger and Zend Studio making the calls from JMeter, however not everyone has Zend Server or Zend Studio installed, and since XDebug is an awesome project I though that will be awesome to do the same using XDebug. [...] As explained previously, using the browser for API debugging can be pretty hard or nearly impossible unless you build some sort of UI, which normally I do not have time to do, so JMeter is perfect for the job!

He includes the configuration changes that'll need to be made to Apache and how to set up and configure the new project in Eclipse. He also includes the setup of the jMeter plan (using his example) and executing it to execute the script/get the debugging information.

Now, I think JMeter is awesome, no doubt about it, however what if I want to test something while developing a new API Endpoint? well I used to be accustom to the nasty var_dump(); exit; combination or if the API was already completed I used to do error_log() everywhere and figure out the results. [...] I love the easy integration that Zend Server has with Zend Studio for debugging and I though to myself, why not just change the client that triggers the debugging console so instead of the browser use JMeter, at the end both uses HTTP so it should work, well guess what, IT DOES, and It's awesome. No more print_r, error_log, var_dump in the API, lets do the Step by Step debugging with JMeter!

He walks you through the steps needed to get it all set up and working together, complete with screenshots. Really, you can use whatever debugger setup you prefer (with something like Xdebug) and have jMeter execute on top of that - there's no interface directly between the debugger and jMeter.

Lastly, I've been blogging about positive performance related feedback on mysqlnd. Whenever I did so, I got some positive feedback - for obvious reasons: I was posting good marketing news. [...] As much as I'd love to, I can't stand behind a simple statement like "mysqlnd makes your applications faster". You must not assume that each and every application will profit from mysqlnd.

His target of choice was WordPress which he ran through a testing cycle with JMeter (a load and performance testing tool). In the end, though, using the mysqlnd drivers and the regular drivers didn't show much of a difference at all. To figure out why, he uses XDebug, APC and KCachegrind to work through where the issues might lie. Unfortunately:

I was not able to see any mysql_*-function in the call graphs. The reason is that the mysql_*-functions do not contribute to the overall runtime of this application in a major way.