Please post your comments and questions below. I reserve the right to snip inappropriate commentary, flame wars and so forth.

If you are reporting a problem:

• Please set Debug Level to 1 and copy the wpTuner Diagnostics report here
• If a specific plugin or widget is misbehaving, please note which one (if you know)

Updated 24 Aug 2009 to Rev 0.9.6. Compatible with latest WP.

The (mu-compatible) WP Tuner plugin for WordPress is a powerful and easy to use way to answer many hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host?

Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin helps blog administrators and software developers improve their WordPress blog performance.

Perfect for:

• WordPress site administrators
• WordPress plugin and theme designers
• WordPress developers

Fully translatable (translations to date: English, Russian.)

Learn more at the WPTuner Page; Discuss on the comment thread.

Downloads

» Download from wordpress.org

• Once installed, a tech can use WP Tuner to debug issues in WP’s installation sequence. A few lines of code in the install and/or admin footer allow use of wptL() debug logging. This made it relatively easy to track down a subtle install-time bug in WordPress that was affecting WP Tuner and other plugins.
• WP Tuner Diagnostics now display plugin names and version numbers for all plugins (whether activated or not.) This is one tiny step toward my goal of providing community-wide plugin performance tuning.

Please post your comments and questions below. I reserve the right to snip inappropriate commentary, flame wars and so forth.

We’re just getting this blog started so I apologize in advance for not having all of our rules laid out already. I intend to write occasional blog posts describing techniques for improving the performance of WordPress. Feel free to ask your hot questions here!

If you are reporting a problem:

• Please set Debug Level to 1 and copy the wpTuner Diagnostics report here
• If a specific plugin or widget is misbehaving, please note which one (if you know)

• “Ignore Query Contents” is a small speed-related feature. If blog performance is of utmost importance, this disables all WP Tuner analysis of database queries, which normally uses up the bulk of WP Tuner’s time.

Below is the archive of comments and questions for WP Tuner version 0.9.4.

This release contained several important improvements:

• Thanks to user feedback, I dug in carefully and found (and worked around) a bug in WordPress. The admin user in a new install does appear to have admin privileges if the traditional ($user_level) test is done.
• I found a way to work around the reduced functionality in older WordPress releases that made it hard to display good CPU timing for each part of WordPress processing.
• I added support for the more unusual MySQL queries. And, if a query is not recognized, its location is identified.

“Throw away the trash. Then, put away your stuff. Then, do your chores (or homework, or whatever.) And then you can go out and play.”

Mom was pretty smart. It’s hard to get anything done when I’m buried in junk!

OK, so how does that relate to WordPress?

My new blog was a little sluggish; the new WP Tuner plugin said my host was taking about 2/3 of a second to generate each page, even with caching enabled. I’m busy right now, so I wanted a quick fix.

Time to take out the trash. My first thought: I have some unused plugins–things I am interested in trying someday.

OK, I admit, I’m messy. I don’t just have some plugins. I have quite a lot of plugins: close to 20 in use (or to be tested in the next few days); and another 18 that, if I’m going to be honest with myself, are really not needed at all. Am I the only plugin slob in the blogosphere?

OK, so maybe this is a useless experiment for you. But I was wondering… would it save any time to remove the extra plugins from the wp-content/plugins folder?

How big a difference do you think that would make?

You’re probably thinking: “get a clue, Mr Pete. An unused, deactivated plugin is not hurting anything at all. You’re wasting your time.”

Maybe so, but this is my time I’m wasting, both in the experiment, and in telling the story. It’s only a waste of your time if you read the whole thing and didn’t learn anything.

So… here’s what I did:

• Created a new folder, wp-content/ex-plugins
• Logged into my host SSH account (to get a Linux shell prompt) and used the cd command to get to my wp-content/plugins folder
• Opened my WordPress plugins page in a browser window to see my list of deactivated plugins
• For each plugin, used mv pluginfoldername ../ex-plugins, to simply move each unused plugin ("pluginfoldername") to the new folder. (There’s lots of ways to do this, whether FTP, WinSCP, or whatever.)

Time for the moment of truth. I refreshed a WordPress page. Blinked twice, and tried a few other pages.

Last chance… how much time do you think it saved?

Average old time: 0.63 cpu seconds. New time: 0.35 cpu seconds.

That’s a 44% speedup, and it took me all of five minutes. A lot less time than it took to tell you about it.

Below is an example of my new page load time from WP Tuner. This is clock time — the cpu time is smaller. Notice that most of the time is still spent loading WordPress code (in wp-settings) and loading plugins.

Obviously, we’ve only just begun to speed things up. I wonder what else I could do…

WP Tuner Page Load Timing