There are many ways to start peeking at the internals, here are a couple:

1. Enable the built in profiler with the ?debug_profile=1 ( More at http://doc.silverstripe.com/doku.php?id=profiler )

2. Use php's built in memory monitoring functions, starting with memory_get_usage(): http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.memory-get-usage.php

3. If the first 2 don't suit you, try using PEAR::Benchmark: http://pear.php.net/package/Benchmark

4. Install xdebug and get your IDE setup with remote debugging so you can use some variant of cachegrind to REALLY get under the hood. With Ubuntu this is pretty trivial as it is in the repos: http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2008/06/debugging-php-using-xdebug.html

Full Details on cachegrinding: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-fastapps2/

Cool, that's pretty helpful. I will see how well I get on with the profiler first, as that requires the minimal amount of setup

Thanks,

Mo

Oh wow, there all these options available that I didn't even know about... I wish I had known about that before this site went live, I wouldn't be where I am now

They are the little 'treats' you learn after using SS for a long time!