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Warning, Alpha version!!

What is WordPress TimeStack?

It's a tool for profiling WordPress development by time/mysql queries/memory usage. It supports multilevel operation based tracking of such metrics.

Why use this over Xdebug (or something similar)?

TimeStack is made for WordPress specifically, this means auto hooking in to measure instances of WP_Query, WP_HTTP, plugins_loaded etc. It's not as advanced as a real PHP profiler, but it's "native" for WordPress.

Why use this over the Debug Bar Profiling tab?

There are two main reasons this is better (objectively of course ;) ) than the Profiling tab.

  1. It is a separate web app which means you get to see all requests, not just pages you can access the Admin Bar (requests that cause redirects etc.).
  2. TimeStack is multilevel, you have operations and events within other events. The Debug Bar gives you a single level rundown, TimeStack let's you drill down through operations.

Screen Shots

I also created a demo screencast with my awful voice (apologies) :) https://vimeo.com/46631839

How do I get this to work?

You need to install the TimeStack Plugin (https://github.com/joehoyle/Time-Stack-Plugin) plugin on your WordPress site, and be running a persistent object cache.

Setting up a persistent object cache with MAMP

If you haven't already, read the codex page on object caching to get an idea of what this is and what your options are.

If you don't want to get involved with memcached, which is fiddly to set up with MAMP, your quickest option is probably to download the APC Object Cache plugin and follow its instructions.

You'll need make sure you've selected 'APC' as your cache extension in MAMP Preferences > PHP.

This done, you need to add the following line towp-config.php, somwhere above "That's all, stop editing!" :

define( 'WP_CACHE', true );

How do I track operations in my code?

This is probably the most important part. TimeStack is really for you own custom code, not 3rd party code. TimeStack has 2 tracking metrics: operations and events. An operation encapsulates code, an event just sets a time stamp for that point in the code. In the above screenshots wp_head and template_redirect are events. We use actions so they can potentially be left in the code when not running the TimeStack Plugin.

To track an operation:

do_action( 'start_operation', 'Call Twitter' );

$twitter_api->get_results( 's=foo' );

do_action( 'end_operation', 'Call Twitter' );

Operations are multilevel so tracking operations within other operations is fine.

To track an event:

do_action( 'add_event', 'Below Footer' );