Performance Profiling System

For more information or to ask questions about this proposal, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/10039.

This project is the development of a profiling module and possible API capable of collecting performance data for hook invocations and calls to enabled functions in addition to the theme and database timings reported by the Devel and Devel Themer modules. The output of this module could include full traces of hooks, theme functions, database queries, external API requests and other functions similar to the trace files generated by debugging tools like XDebug but tailored to provide information that is useful to module developers and site builders. Other useful reports might include ranked execution times to highlight problem code and statistical aggregates gathered multiple page loads.

Development of this module will involve an understanding of Drupal's inner workings and will provide an excellent opportunities to learn the details of how each page is built from the ground up. It will also provide a great service to the Drupal development community, Drupal integrators and systems administrators. Use of the devel module is fine for identifying runaway queries, but it can be difficult to tie this to a complete picture of the system's modules, particularly if a module is making too many API calls rather than just too many large database queries, is making use of suboptimal algorithms or is encountering systems-level bottlenecks.