Turn recording on and off
The Paul Bunyan switch: on, off, on for a set time, or on for your browser only. Plus the wp-config.php off switch and the safety switch that turns Paul Bunyan off by itself.
On this page
Paul Bunyan has one switch, in the header of every Paul Bunyan screen and in the admin bar. Off means off: no hooks, no browser script and nothing written to the database. The screens still show what was recorded before.
The choices
| Choice | What it does |
|---|---|
| Turn on | Records until you turn it off. |
| On for 15 minutes, 1 hour or 24 hours | Records, then switches itself off. Good for a short investigation on a busy site. |
| On, this browser only | Records only your own visits, from the browser you pressed it in. Visitors are not traced. Useful for reproducing a problem on a live site. |
| Turn off | Stops all recording. |
You can profile one page on demand from the Compare screen even while recording is off.
Switch it off without logging in
If the dashboard itself will not load, add this line to wp-config.php:
define( 'PAUL_BUNYAN_OFF', true );Paul Bunyan then does nothing at all, and the switch in the header says it was switched off in wp-config.php. Remove the line to use the switch again.
From the command line
wp pb on --for=60
wp pb off
wp pb statusWhen Paul Bunyan switches itself off
Paul Bunyan watches its own cost. If it costs more than the safety limit (150 ms by default) on five ordinary requests inside ten minutes, or the log table cannot be written, it switches itself off so it cannot make things worse, and records why as PB-1008.
It counts a request against itself only when its own cost is over the limit and is also at least a tenth of the whole request. So a server that is slow for everyone, during a bot burst say, does not trip it.
Read the reason, fix it (lower Trace this percent of requests or the discovery rate, raise the safety limit, or check the database), then turn it back on. See Settings.