In this session we will look at low-level (Linux) system debugging tools to find out what is going on (or wrong!) with your PHP environment, although the techniques are also valid for other programs besides PHP. We will cover debugging crashes with gdb, checking out memory leaks with valgrind, and many other tools to find out what is going wrong, and hopefully, figure out why. This session teaches tools to help out with tracking down bugs, and provides information on how to get better at debugging connection issues, crashes, files not being written, etc. The session is also valuable for people who want to help out with providing good bug reports for Open Source projects.

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Nathan Dunn at 16:17 on 30 Sep 2017

In this talk, I learned some useful commands for debugging my PHP environment. I did think the talk was a little underprepared and needed to be more structured.

Useful tools, I've heard people discuss them before when debugging applications and it was interesting to learn more about them, but I think the talk needs some more practice. It became a little difficult to follow, lots of tabbing between screens until the demo worked, etc. Lots of potential, and over-all the content was good.

Mark Railton at 21:18 on 1 Oct 2017

Felt too fast paced. I appreciated that he had issues through the demos which further helped to show his debug process, although would have been better had Derick maybe talked through those steps as well.

Having been to several of Dericks talks over the past couple of years I feel that this was not his strongest one.

Another talk from Derrick where he again showed us how much we don't know about php. Maybe I will never use those tools to debug on so low level. Anyway it was nice to see that it is possible to track errors like segmentation fault, etc. Good to know what is happening under the PHP hood. Thanks

Thomas Dutrion at 10:00 on 2 Oct 2017

I will definitely agree with some of the other comments, compared to what Derick got us used to, this talk was a bit under in terms of flow, hence the note. Though I do get the exercise was pretty complex, as the choice he made was to deliver a technical, example based talk, therefore accepting this back and forth between slides and terminal.
As an advanced topic, I found it quite easy to follow in terms of content, which definitely means the talk is almost ready to be as good as Derick's other talks, live demos aside, and I'd love to thank him again for that!