Screenshot of the administration report page

Overview

This is a development helper module that enables your developers to see:

  • A list of the highest memory usage variables stored in the {variable} table sorted by highest to lowest. There is also a list of links to drupal.org issues to help resolve some known high usage offenders. If you know of an issue that exists that aims to resolve in-efficient usage of the variable table, please raise a new issue in the issue queue for this module.
  • A list of all suspected orphaned variables in the variable table. This is determined by whether or not the variable is:
    • Not a variable provided by Drupal core
    • Does not start with an enabled module name

    This can help you find and remove potential abandoned variables that are of no use to you and your site.

It is recommended that this module only be enabled in development, as that is where the module is most useful. The module has been tested to work on both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and runs even on large complex sites (with > 1,250 variables).

Drush integration

As of 7.x-1.1 there is now Drush integration, help can be found be executing:

drush help variable-debug

Related Modules

  • Variable Cleanup - Conceptually a similar module, although this one works by scanning your entire filesystem for unused variables, which could be in-efficient on larger sites. There also is no facility to order variables by memory usage.
  • Variable Check - This module checks your variable table for consistency. A Drupal upgrade from Drupal 5 -> Drupal 7 can leave behind issues here. This module will work nicely in parallel with this.

Installation

  1. Copy the Variable debug module directory to the modules folder in your installation.
  2. Enable the module using Administer -> Modules (/admin/modules)

Further Reading

If you wish to read more about the variable system in Drupal and how this works, please read these great blog posts:

Project information

Releases