Debug Bar

One of the goals at our meetup two weeks ago was to find ways to improve the developer experience on WordPress.com VIP. As a first step, we’re rolling out the Debug Bar to all VIP developers.

If you have Administrator access to a VIP site and have read- or write-access to the VIP SVN repo, the Debug Bar will be automatically enabled for you.

You can use the Debug Bar for quick troubleshooting of your sites such as examining how WordPress interprets the page request and the resulting WP_Query object. You will also get a summary of all queries on the page and a breakdown of any remote requests, which is very useful in tracking and fixing down slow performing pieces of your sites.

(If you haven’t already, we also recommend installing the Debug Bar in your development environment.)

What else can we add to to the Debug Bar to make it more useful? Let us know in the comments below.

Short Interruption in Service

At approximately 9:38AM Eastern time, our monitoring systems alerted us to a problem affecting many services on WordPress.com.  Upon further investigation, it was discovered that a segment of our database cluster had become overloaded because of a code change introducing a new expensive database query.  The change was reverted, and site functionality was fully restored by 9:50AM Eastern time.

We have automatic protection against some expensive queries. We’re working on further isolating the impact of database load.