_buildSignatures and _reflect eating up resources?

[mattcreative]

Hey guys, this is my first time working with Zend and I am running into some issues with load testing coming to a crawl. The response times sky-rocket and throughput crashes. My first step is to trim the fat off of the response time on my requests so I am starting with the biggest time-consumers.

I have intermittently profiled the requests with xdebug during the load testing. When I examine the profiles at all intervals I notice that majority of time spent of all requests is spent running Zend functions, between 20% and 40% between two Zend functions alone.

These time-hogs are: Zend_Server_Reflection_Function_Abstract->_buildSignatures, and Zend_Server_Reflection_Function_Abstract->_reflect which are called around 45 times each, per request.

I can't find a lot of information of these functions (other than brief descriptions) that does not seem to require a more deep understanding of Zend to figure out exactly what determines how many times these functions are called. Is it due to how I initialize some of my code?, the number of functions I call?, etc..

I need to get response times for my requests down and these two functions seem like the first place to start. Any ideas on what specifically they do, and how I can cut down their resource use?

Thanks,
Matt