Magento profiler, manually output selected profiles

Question

How do we manually output profiler results? For example if we wanted to output just few keys/sections? Right now when we switch on the profiler it will output all sections.

Answer 1

By default, in order to turn on Magento profiler, basically you need to do these two steps.

1) Make System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer > Debug > Profiler to Yes.

2) Uncomment the line Varien_Profiler::enable() which comes inside index.php.

So the second step is what you need to alter in your case. Since the line Varien_Profiler::enable() is included before the application runner code Mage::run(), this means profiler is enabled globally.

So what you want to do is, remove or comment out Varien_Profiler::enable() line of code from index.php and then put that line wherever you want to see the output. If you don't want to see the profiler buckets¹ other than your custom profiler buckets, then after your buckets, you should disable profiler by putting Varien_Profiler::disable().

So basically, this is what you need to do.

//enables profiler
Varien_Profiler::enable();

//your custom profiler buckets starts
Varien_Profiler::start('unique_code')

/**
 * You custom code comes here
 *
 */

//your custom profiler buckets ends.
Varien_Profiler::stop('unique_code');

//disables profiler to avoid further profiling
Varien_Profiler::disable()

That's it. Now clear all cache and load the page again. You will see the profiler data only from your custom profiler buckets.

Note: Other than this manual enabling, I am not aware of any other better profiler enabling/disabling technique.

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¹ Profiler buckets are codes that comes in between a particular Varien_Profiler::start('unique_code') and Varien_Profiler::stop('unique_code').