Using DBG with PHPed 3.3 has been extremely slow on our dsl connection, and basically useless on a dial up. Doesn't matter whether
I open the session with IDE or the editor. It's always stalling mid way, and then I have to try again, or it just takes minutes to step through a dozen lines of code. I haven't had time to try and track this down, but now I don't have time not to!

Does anybody else have this problem?

Performance depends on a) bandwidth and b) size of all variables in current and in global scopes.
You may try to work through ssh with compression enabled (-C)
Ssh itself can be run without any encryption or with less time-consuming ciphers.