On the Hackernoon.com site there's a recent post from Paolo Agostinetto showing you how to debug your PHP application with a different tool that most might use: strace.

Every once in a while it happens that you have a tricky bug, and when it does you risk to lose hours or even days fixing it.

[...] Yet, sometimes there is that one bug that makes you lose your shit after a whole afternoon spent looking for the root cause. In my experience, bugs that I introduce are generally very quick and easy to spot and fix. But the real challenge is finding bugs in other people’s code like third party libraries, PHP extensions or even PHP itself.

He then talks about a time when his situation was a bit different - he was getting 500 errors from his code that weren't being caught correctly by error handling. He found that Apache was out-of-memory-ing but debugging the exact cause (a suspect Doctrine query) would take more time. Instead he turned to strace and, with a bit of hunting in the resulting output, he tracked the issue down to XDebug being enabled (and a setting that was generating a memory leak).