Dobsie

Your site got slow. Something is running too many database queries, and you would like to know what.

Tools exist that answer this. The trouble is that reading them turns out to be its own skill, and plenty of people open one, meet a wall of tabs and numbers, and quietly close it again assuming they are the problem. They are not. The information was there. It was not readable.

Dobsie shows you less, and shows it where you already are.

A small panel sits in the corner of the page you were already looking at. How long the page took, how many queries it ran and how long those took, peak memory, and a bar chart of which plugin is responsible for what. Queries slower than 20ms are called out on their own. When the answer is one badly behaved plugin, you can see it without going anywhere or learning anything first.

When you want the detail, Tools > Dobsie has it, including several things that are genuinely hard to find out on your own. Whether OPcache is switched on and actually working. How much autoloaded data every single page request is dragging along, and which options are the worst of it. Which plugin owns which rewrite rules. Whether your cron is healthy.

Only administrators see any of it, on the front end and in the admin alike.

The panel on the page

What it shows:

• Total page load time
• Database query count and total query time
• Peak memory usage
• Top sources by query time (visual bar chart)
• Slow queries (>20ms)

Only administrators ever see it. You can minimise it, close it, or switch it off for good at Tools > Dobsie, where the setting is called Enable performance toast overlay. Add ?perf=0 to any URL to hide it for a single page load.

Admin Profiler Page (Tools > Dobsie)

Four tabs provide deep diagnostics:

Overview

• Memory usage, active plugin count, total queries, autoloaded data size
• Database cleanup stats (revisions, transients, expired transients)
• Quick page test (client-side timing for any URL)
• Autoloaded options table (top 15 by size)
• Rewrite rules analysis grouped by source plugin
• Actionable recommendations

Deep Scan

• Query breakdown by plugin/source with visual bar chart
• Slow queries (>10ms) with SQL preview and source identification
• Worst offenders analysis with optimization suggestions
• Slow query pattern detection (which tables are hit most)
• Requires SAVEQUERIES (enabled automatically for this tab)

Server Health

• Filesystem health (cache directories, uploads, log files)
• PHP configuration (memory, execution time, OPcache status)
• Object cache detection (Redis, Memcached, or none)
• Cron health (scheduled event count, overdue jobs, and which hooks schedule the most)
• Active hooks analysis (callback counts on eight common hooks, so you can see what is crowded)
• Execution time breakdown
• Problem file detection (oversized logs, error files in web root)

Debug

• Full per-source query list with live filtering
• Requires SAVEQUERIES (enabled automatically for this tab)

Key Features

• Nothing to configure. Activate it and the panel is there.
• Administrators only, on the front end and in the admin alike. Visitors are unaffected.
• Query tracing switches on where it is needed and off again where it is not.
• No external dependencies, and no database tables of its own.
• Query sources are named by plugin, theme or mu-plugin, so the answer points at something.
• Suggestions for what it finds, rather than numbers and good luck.

Dobsie is a Tracksies plugin made by A Lined Design, a WordPress studio in Hobart, Tasmania. Every one of them started as something a client site needed, and they all still run on the sites we build. The full range lives at tracksies.com. For more about the studio, or custom site work, see alineddesign.com.