Paul Bunyan

Your site is slow, or something keeps throwing errors, and you need to know which plugin, which file and which line is responsible. Paul Bunyan watches every request on your own server and tells you, in plain words, what to fix first.

No server extension, no outside service, no code changes. It runs wherever WordPress runs, including shared hosting.

What it finds

• Which plugin is slowing down your site. Time and memory per plugin and theme, split into front end, dashboard, AJAX and background requests.
• Slow pages and a slow dashboard. Every request timed, with processor time and memory, the numbers a hosting CPU limit counts.
• Slow database queries, grouped by shape and ranked by total time, with the plugin, file and line that ran them.
• Slow outside calls: license checks, APIs and webhooks that hold a page up.
• PHP errors, warnings and deprecation notices, grouped so a notice repeated thousands of times shows as one line with a count.
• Email: how long each message took to build and to send.
• Background jobs: WP-Cron and Action Scheduler jobs that are waiting, late or failing.
• Real page loads in visitors’ browsers, with Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS).
• Site setup checks: autoloaded options, object cache, OPcache, transients, scheduled jobs, debug settings and page cache.

Fix first, in plain words

One ranked list of what costs your site the most: what it is, where it is, how often it happens, how much time it takes and what to do about it. Every finding carries a numbered PB code with a full explanation on diamondsierra.com.

Built to stay on

• Small footprint: about 10 to 20 ms per request in our tests on a WooCommerce store (median of 20 loads per page, logged in).
• A safety switch turns recording off by itself if it ever costs visitors too much.
• Switch it on for an hour, for your browser only, or off, from the admin bar.

For developers

• Log from your own code with paul_bunyan_info(), paul_bunyan_warn(), paul_bunyan_error(), paul_bunyan_scope(), paul_bunyan_event() and paul_bunyan_mark().
• Use do_action( 'paul_bunyan_log', ... ) in code that must also run where Paul Bunyan is not installed.
• Open any request as a timeline of hooks, queries, outside calls, emails and your own messages.
• Profile one page on demand, compare two requests, and set a marker to compare before and after a change.
• WP-CLI: wp pb status, wp pb fix, wp pb report, wp pb on and wp pb off.

Your data stays on your site

Everything is stored in your own database. Nothing is sent to us or to anyone else. Email addresses are masked. Export or delete your data at any time. The AI report is a plain-text summary you copy or download and paste into the AI assistant of your choice; the plugin itself contacts no AI service.

By default it keeps 3 days of full detail and 7 days of everything else. Both are settings (up to 400 days), and a size limit keeps the log from growing past what you allow.

Paul Bunyan Professional

An optional add-on for people who need more: Show the fix, alert rules, “got slower” detection, WooCommerce order trails, scheduled page checks, email reports, Ask AI with your own key, and private support. Everything listed above stays free. Details at diamondsierra.com

Since 1999

The original Paul Bunyan Message Logger showed Windows developers the function, module and line behind a bottleneck. This is the same idea, rebuilt for WordPress. Documentation and PB codes

External services

This plugin does not connect to any outside service. To profile a page or test your page cache, it loads pages from your own site, and nowhere else. Nothing it records leaves your site unless you copy it yourself (for example the AI report, which you can paste into an AI assistant of your choice).

Privacy

• Log data stays in your own database, in two tables, and is removed on uninstall.
• Values are stripped from SQL and from URLs before storing. Keys that look like secrets are redacted. Email addresses are masked.
• The browser timing script sets no cookies and stores no identifiers. It reports paths and timings only.
• Only administrators can see the log.