How well do these two play together? I've heard stories, mostly negative,
especially about incompatibilities with wp software, forums etc.

I'm trying to

learn

  how to really optimize

php

  code. If anyone wants to get
into some advanced

php

  code optimization talk, that would be cool.

Don't know about XDebug, but I don't need a debugger in any case (he said with impressive confidence) - but APC is the cat's meow. Plug and play (pretty much) and instant performance increase. As soon as you get your arms around using it for user caching as well you can get into some really efficient mods for your code.

Do it all the time, ping if you want ideas.
/p

Well the only reason to work with xdebug is to see about the bottlenecks in

php

  scripts, too bad you can't see more info without
cake

php

  which I think is fine if you like wasting your time installing it just to see actual queries since you can see how many
queries are being run but not the actual query rambling willie bla bla blah.

APC is great even though you need to turn off Zend Optimizer which a lot of popular scripts use such as
the halfagain stuff and thats why some folks do without it oh well life isn't perfect, true.

Well all I gotta say is let the servers burn or just install the new openads 2.4.* and DIY.