The solution: Use a good debugger! Recommendation: Xdebug (http://xdebug.org) Open source Wide spreaded and used Integrates as a PHP extension Integration with IDEs (like Comodo) Support for profiling and code-coverage analysis Some other debuggers: DBG http://dd.cron.ru/ APD http://apd.communityconnect.com/ Zend IDE (commercial) http://zend.com