What the capture buffer is #
The 60-second capture buffer is the rolling window of diagnostic data the Loupely WordPress Plugin maintains continuously. At any moment, the plugin has a record of the PHP Errors, hook executions, and WooCommerce pipeline events that fired in the last 60 seconds on your server. When you click Run Diagnosis, the extension captures what happened in that window.
Why a buffer exists instead of capturing on demand #
Many failures happen at the moment of a user action: the instant you click “Place Order,” the instant you submit a form, the instant you hit “Save” on a product. If Loupely only started capturing when you clicked Run Diagnosis, it would miss the event that caused the failure, because the failure already happened before you opened the popup.
The buffer solves this by recording continuously. By the time you see something go wrong and reach for the extension, the failure event is already in the buffer. As long as you trigger the diagnosis within 60 seconds of the failure, the relevant data is there.
What the 60-second window means in practice #
When you’re diagnosing a problem: trigger the failure (click the button, submit the form, do whatever causes the issue), then open the Loupely popup and click Run Diagnosis within 60 seconds. Don’t navigate away from the result page before running the diagnosis, because navigation triggers a new page load and starts a new context.
If you trigger a failure, get distracted, and come back 2 minutes later, the buffer will have rolled past the failure event. You’ll need to reproduce the failure and diagnose it within the window. This is rarely a significant inconvenience: most failures are reproducible by repeating the action that caused them.
Performance impact of the buffer #
The buffer collects diagnostic signals passively as part of WordPress’s normal execution. It adds a small overhead to each page load: the plugin hooks into WordPress’s error handling and hook system to record events as they fire. The data is written to a local database table on your server. The buffer is bounded: entries older than 60 seconds are pruned on each page load. The overhead is designed to be minimal and should not be perceptible in normal site operation.