Is there a best practice (IDE-based?), a PHP/bash script or something else to
This is what you are looking for: http://xdebug.org/docs/profiler. You can set up netbeans to attach to php process, than run scripts step by step, watch current variables content and analyze its running times.
Just add dll to other php extension, configure by php ini:
; xdebug
zend_extension = "C:\php\v5.4\ext\php_xdebug-2.2.3-5.4-vc9-nts.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=on
;xdebug.remote_log="/var/log/xdebug.log"
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.profiler_enable=1
xdebug.profiler_output_dir="C:\dev\profilling\"
Netbeans setup:
Then press Ctrl+F5 in netbeans (debugging). Than you can run script step by step and watch current variables values:
To browse generated profilers log use http://sourceforge.net/projects/precompiledbin/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/wincachegrind/ in windows, or http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/Home.html for linux.