WampServer

Hello

I've been trying to find a solution to this problem for weeks now, without success. In December, I updated my WAMP installation to version 3.4.0, along with the various PHP versions, MariDB, etc. At that time, Xdebug 3.5.0 wasn't yet available. On December 28, 2025, I installed version Xdebug 3.5.0 and switched to PHP 8.5.

Since then, I've had the problem that page loading ( in phpBB ) has become very slow; it now takes two to three times as long as before. It's especially bad when I rebuild the cache in phpBB, which often needs to be done during development. Normally, this rebuild takes two to three seconds, but now it takes 20 to 25 seconds.

Then I checked the WAMP logs and noticed the xdebug.log file. There, corresponding entries are logged at the exact times in question, for example, when I rebuild the phpBB cache:

[4808] Log opened at 2026-01-16 12:39:19.390707
[4808] [Config] WARN: Can't create control Named Pipe (0x0)
[4808] Log closed at 2026-01-16 12:39:45.825834

Here you can clearly see that "something" takes 26 seconds. A web search for this error message yields hardly any results; the best I found was this:

[stackoverflow.com]

However, that describes a completely different scenario, and I wouldn't know where to enter the suggested solution in WAMP.

What I discovered through testing: at first, I thought it was solely due to Xdebug 3.5.0, but even when I downgrade to the version I had before, 3.4.7, the problem remains the same. Then I found out that it's specifically related to PHP 8.5. As soon as I switch to PHP 8.4, everything works as expected in terms of speed. The problem only occurs when I switch to PHP 8.5.

I should also mention that I'm using httpd-vhosts.conf because I need several separate installations of phpBB running in parallel, each with its own PHP version.

Has anyone encountered this problem and found a solution?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2026 03:03PM by LukeWCS.

Hi,

The solution is to disable xDebug while waiting for version 3.5.1 and report this issue to xDebug.

https://xdebug.org/reporting-bugs

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Documentation Apache - Documentation PHP - Documentation MySQL - Wampserver install files & addons

Hi Dominique

Thanks, the link to the tracker made me realize I'm not the first one with this problem. I would have been surprised if I had been, because the problem is extreme, at least in my case.

There are already two other entries there. While they differ from my observation, the significant performance loss with PHP 8.5 is the core issue there as well. So the problem is also known to the developer.

Before I looked at the tracker, I found another workaround: I noticed that Xdebug adds itself to various PHP.ini files during installation. I experimented with these settings and solved the problem by simply disabling all Xdebug functions, since I only need the formatting of var_dump() so far. For that, I now simply use Xdebug's own native function. This workaround also has the pleasant side effect that page loading is now even faster than before. Logically, if almost everything in Xdebug is disabled. ^^

This is also what I've seen with PHP 8.5 and Xdebug. The named pipe warning is a sign that Xdebug is basically blocking while it tries to set up control plumbing that 8.5 changed behind the scenes. It's worse on WAMP because php.ini gets combined across vhosts. If you care about how fast phpBB development is going, the only smart thing to do right now is to turn off most of Xdebug's features (mode=off or just keep var_display). It's that simple: PHP 8.4 is fine, but PHP 8.5 isn't ready for production with Xdebug yet. Wait for a fix or only use Xdebug on a per-vhost basis, not globally.