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My WordPress administration interface often runs very slowly on both of my main blogs. Searching for reasons turned up all the usual – and useless – RTFM advice, and a pointer to WP Tuner plugin, which attempts to measure WordPress behavior.

WP-Tuner is a WordPress plugin that provides a listing of how various parts of your WordPress installation are behaving.

So I installed it.

I didn’t find WP Tuner immediately useful for two reasons:

1. Most of the time (69%) was listed in the “Start” field with no other information. That’s not helpful. At least, not helpful to me. This one is the biggie.

   The next reason may be mostly that I didn’t see any documentation and didn’t know what to expect.

2. It displays it’s output to the user facing side of WordPress, either by default, or by some mis-configuration that I did not understand. Either way, it’s embarrassing to me when readers see an entire listing at the bottom of the page. Hopefully, it didn’t get indexed by search engines in the 3 hours I had the plugin turned on.

   I realize that this is arguably a feature… but my timing issues are focused on the admin rather than the user side. So I was astonished to see the output (“astonished” in this context is a technical term).

Here’s the real Gotcha!: If you have a cache running, perhaps generated by WP Super Cache, you will need to clear this cache to immediately rebuild your pages and get rid of the WP-Tuner output. After you clear your cache, go ahead and rebuild the cache to make sure the tuner output is no longer present.

I’m going to keep an eye on WP Tuner though. There’s a lot to like, and it looks like it could be phenomenally useful as it’s development proceeds. If you’re a WordPress do-it-yourselfer, and you have 30 minutes to spend on WordPress maintenance, you might want to check this plugin out for yourself.

You gotta Gotcha? Wanna post it here on Website In A Weekend? Send it on along.