MT Extensions: MTTimer 1.0

Plugins : MTTimer 1.0 Apr 14 2003 | # | C:8

MTTimer 1.0

April 14, 2003 - updated February 8, 2006 (Download)

The MTTimer tags allow you to display the time it took for MovableType to build your page, or portions of your page. If your page builds take a long time, the MTTimer tags may help you detect which parts of your page take the longest time to build. They are also useful to fine tune performance when developing plugins.

Modules Used:
Time::HiRes

MTTimerStart
Starts a new timer or restarts and existing timer. The default timer is automatically started when the CGI that is building the page begins executing.
- name=”timer1”
MTTimerValue
Displays the time elapsed since the specified timer was started.
- name=”timer1”
  Specifies which timer’s value is displayed. The default is “”, or default imer.
- clock=”real”, “user”, “system”, “exec”, “stats”
  Specifies whether to display total time elapsed (“real”) or time spent executing in user mode (“user”) system mode (“system”) or user and system (“exec”) mode combined. You can also specify “stats” to display all the times combined:
```
user    0.83
sys     0.05
real    2.53
       34.84%
```
- format=”Page built in %.2f seconds” This attribute allows you to change how the time is displayed; the default is ”%.2f”.

Example:
Place the following tag at the bottom of your search template (MovableType/search_templates/default.tmpl) to show how long it took to perform the search:

<MTTimerValue format="Search time: %.2f seconds.">

Example:
The following code uses two timers (“entries” and “entry”) which will display individual and cumulative times for building a list of entries followed by status information about how much time was spent building the page inside the MTEntries tags:

<MTTimerStart name="entries">
<MTEntries>
    <MTTimerStart name="entry">
    ...
    <MTTimerValue name="entry">, <MTTimerValue name="entries">
</MTEntries>
<pre><MTTimerValue name="entries" clock="stats"></pre>

Comments | All

1) Posted by: Nick on October 22, 2003 10:47 AM

Hi, this looks great, but where do I get the results? I don’t want them appearing all over the page because the site is already live. Is there some way to get them in a txt file or something?

Cheers.

2) Posted by: stepan on October 22, 2003 11:03 AM

Right now, the timer plugin doesn’t have any built-in logging facilities. If you need that, you could probably write it using Brad Choate’s MTPerlScript plugin.

On a live site, I recomend that you put the MTTimer output into an HTML comment so that your users don’t see it. Personally, during optimization I put the timer output on the bottom of the page in a small, gray font so it doesn’t stand out. When I’m done optimizing, I take it out.

3) Posted by: Nick on October 24, 2003 4:09 AM

Ahh yes, HTML comments, that’s a good idea, thanks!

4) Posted by: Michael on November 15, 2003 3:06 PM

Stepan, another nice plug-in. I’d prefer it if it let me stop a timer, too. I’d like to put all my time display code at the bottom (in HTML comments).

5) Posted by: Michael on November 15, 2003 3:20 PM

Speaking of Comments,
<MTTimerValue format=”<!—Page time: %.2f seconds.—>”>
produces 19.57”>

I’ll try it again with my html outside the format. Is this a case where the format string needs to be escaped?

6) Posted by: mike on November 18, 2003 6:48 PM

I cant seem to get it to work- the search example above.

i also tried to put it in a page as listed and it didnt work.

my host does have the installed perl mod.

any sugs?

7) Posted by: Adam on May 18, 2004 7:25 AM

A great MT plugin. I’ve got one question, though: what does the percentage in the “stats” clock represent?

8) Posted by: stepan on May 18, 2004 8:41 AM

The percentage in the stats info represent how much of the real time was spent on behalf of the MT process. The formula used to calculate it is:

100 * (user+system)/real