Add option to limit number of parallel debug connections

[iandunn]

When I'm debugging I often have multiple browser tabs open for the site, to test various aspects of it. Those pages often have "heartbeat" XHR requests that run automatically every ~30 seconds. Every time a new request comes in, the Run and Debug panel switches to it, and I have to stop the new request, then go back to my original one. That makes debugging very frustrating.

I think it'd be useful to have an option to limit the number of parallel requests, similar to the maxConnections option in the Xdebug extension.

---

Note: I've tried adding the endpoint filename to the exclude param, but that doesn't do what I want. I want to completely ignore any requests to a specific URL/file, rather than processing the request but bypass the file when stepping through the code.

As a workaround, I've tried enabling both extensions, but this one always seems to process the request, and I haven't found a way to make the Xdebug one "win" the conflict.

[jakubmisek]

Thank you for the suggestions. The maxConnections option might help.

Although (but we don't have the setting for it yet) Xdebug itself has a few settings to control connections more accurately.

Would it help if you could debug only requests with a specific GET parameter? We would take advantage of Xdebug's trigger_value setting, so Xdebug would initiate connection only if there is a specified ?XDEBUG_TRIGGER=... query parameter. Any other request would not even initiate the connection back to VSCode.

[jakubmisek]

@iandunn pre-release 1.35.13329 adds "trigger" launch setting which allows to debug only requests with XDEBUG_TRIGGER GET parameter, i.e.

        {
            "name": "Debug built-in server",
            "type": "php",
            "request": "launch",
            "runtimeArgs": ["-S", "localhost:8000"],
            "trigger": "Start",
        },

so only localhost?XDEBUG_TRIGGER=Start will initiate debugging.

[iandunn]

🤔 That could help, but it could also be inconvenient to add it manually whenever I want to debug. I'll look into Xdebug's native settings, though, I hadn't thought of that 👍🏻

[iandunn]

I checked the settings but didn't see anything related to limiting the # of simultaneous connections. Which one were you thinking of?

[Miloslav]

Hello,

Sorry it took a while, the next preview version will include the settings.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[iandunn]

Thanks!