Profiling is the nice, cozy, and lazy way to efficiency. There’s something neat about avoiding optimization and having the numbers to prove it relative to an initial baseline. In PHP there’s Xdebug and KCachegrind and I recently saw php-spx in my feeds. A profiler in any language environment with snapshots of performance over time is just — well nice. The terribad situation is not understanding exactly how something became slow. It might be too late then.