How to fix a slow performing xampp php 7

So I was for once in a long time again busy with web development, trying out the new PHP 7 in combination with xampp. Being frustrated by the slow page servings on my decent hardware equipped localhost, I went out to find the bottleneck.

As it turned out it was the the PHP debugger that slowed the process down by a lot. In old xampp packages this was known as the 'zend_xdebug' extension. However it changed with PHP 7.

To fix it, simply open up your 'php.ini' file, and mark out the following line

extension=php_cl_dbg_7_0_VC14.dll

To

;extension=php_cl_dbg_7_0_VC14.dll

Disabling the debugger did the trick for me, although I'll miss the fancy reports now...