DevShed has posted their next-to-last article in their look at using XDebug in your applications - part six, a look at doing some benchmarking with functions the extension provides.

You'll be pleased to hear that the Xdebug extension comes equipped with additional functions that allow us to perform other debugging tasks, such as benchmarking PHP applications and checking in what order certain functions were called by the PHP engine. Therefore, in this sixth chapter of the series I’ll be discussing in depth how to take advantage of the benchmarking abilities offered by the Xdebug library, which rely heavily on its "xdebug_time_index()" function.

Their benchamrking example uses the xdebug_time_index function to compare the start and end times of a script. Dropping it into a method in a class makes it even easier - they call the getTime method in their Timer class to grab the latest value.