As you can see, activating the code coverage analysis multiplies the time needed to run the test suites. Those are just examples of course, and depending on the size and complexity of your project and its tests you may obtain completely different results. Nevertheless, execution time will increase, sometimes to the point where your CI platform will time out before the end of the analysis.

In this article, we will take a look at three quick ways of speeding up the code coverage collection: first by optimizing xdebug usage, then by replacing it with an alternative code coverage driver (phpdbg and pcov).