In a new post to the jfoobar blog today Wilco Jansen looks at two methods of profiling available to Joomla CMS users to help get the most performance out of your PHP applications - one onside Joomla and the other using XDebug.

In this article I want to explain the basics of profiling and profiling tools available in Joomla and PHP. In follow up articles I will explain the usage of the tools presented in this blog. I will also try to set up a performance analyses so we can see what the state of Joomla 1.6 is, but that is also for later concern. This article is based on tools that are freely available for almost all platforms.

The post is pretty quick and is more of an exposure to the two technologies than a detailed guide. Enabling the Joomla profiling is just a matter of turning on the "Debug System" command in the "Global Configuration" panel to add additional data to the logs. On the PHP side (at a lower level) you can get even more detail with XDebug including the output of a cachegrind file that can be tool through a tool for better visualization (like KCacheGrind or Webgrind).