15 thoughts on “More Visitors, More Stats”

1. I prefer to use ShortStat, but with 25,000 vis­itor per month, you will have to run the _killprevious.php script each month to clear out the stats from the pre­vi­ous month. Oth­er­wise, the data­base will become far too large and far too slow.

   You can find the cur­rent ver­sion of ShortStat here: http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2005/01/nofollow-the-leader

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2. Hi Mac­ManX
   Unfor­tu­nately, I really need the older stats to track over­all totals and longer term trends. My cur­rent sys­tem is stor­ing around 70MB of data!

   Mike

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3. Ah, you’re look­ing for a long-term solu­tion. Have you tried AWStats? My AWStats only regen­er­ates every 24 hours, so I keep ShortStat around as a live stats solu­tion, but I use AWStats for my long-term statistics.

   http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

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4. Use AWStats as I sug­ges­ted before. It takes about 10 minutes a day to gen­er­ate details stats for ~1200 daily visits.

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5. I use PPhlog­ger also (ver 2.2.4) and have no prob­lems with it. It’s cur­rently hold­ing 122Mb of data and while it’s a little slow it still does the job.

   I also have AWStats, it’s default with my host. I rarely use it but it looks ok.

   I have also used AXS:
   http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/
   It’s a very good script but you’d need to clear out your records frequently.

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6. You might want to use WP-stattraq. Its a really nice tool which does not count the crawler/bot hits which Shortstat seems to include in the display.

   It’s avail­able at

   Wp-StatTraq

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7. Hi AJ,
   Unfor­tu­nately, I also need to record more than just my blog pages, so a WP only stat pack­age won’t do.

   Thanks for all the sug­ges­tions folks, I’m look­ing into a few dif­fer­ent pack­ages at the moment.

   Mike

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8. A typ­ical vir­tual account with real­time PHP stats should be able to man­age 50k visitors/day without a prob­lem – if you are hav­ing dif­fi­culty with 25k/month, some sloppy spa­ghetti code could be the cul­prit, either that or MySQL is slow­ing you down – I per­son­ally prefer flat files, as does WebSideStory.

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9. PJ,
   thanks for your com­ments. I think you are right that pphlog­ger should be able to cope. I remem­ber Matt dropped Power Pphlog­ger last year for per­form­ance reas­ons, but I don’t ima­gine my traffic is any­thing like Matt’s!
   I know that my server is not optim­ized in any way. I should look at that too.

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10. Sorry I’m not too famil­iar with this script – but I looked at the fea­ture list… Here are some things that could be slow­ing it down:

    “traceroutes by above.net” This could be slow­ing it down – traceroutes can take some time. You can prob­ably do the traceroutes from your own server to speed things up, but traceroute info isn’t very use­ful any­way – maybe turn it off.

    Maybe shorten this timeout if it’s more than 1 day by default. “stores IP-adress+cookie to avoid mul­tiple hits by the same user (you can set a timeout)” If this script runs in real­time, it could be wast­ing a lot of time scan­ning a big log file each time a new hit comes in. If you’re set­ting a cookie, why use a timeout at all? If the surfer has your cookie already then don’t count the hit as unique – simple – incre­ment your raw count instead.

    “visitor-path” As with the pre­vi­ous fea­ture, this code could be wast­ing a lot of time scan­ning the entire data­base over and over and over again match­ing IP’s… I’m not sure if this runs in real­time or what, but off the top of my head – you could just keep the hit list sor­ted in a flat file, then as new hits come in, just go down the list in order… if there’s a cookie already, then search for a match, then drop it in. In this man­ner, all the repeat vis­its will usu­ally be right at the top of the list, sav­ing a ton of search time… and you would know ahead of time if this was a repeat visit because you can test for the cookie before doing any­thing, and if there’s no cookie yet, set the cookie then add this hit to the top of your list in case they click some­thing else… in sum­mary, keep­ing your hit lists sor­ted saves your script from hav­ing to do much search­ing at all. I would ima­gine this is a lot faster than using mysql.

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11. PJ,
    Pphlog­ger doesn’t do its ana­lysis in real time, it merely logs the inform­a­tion obtained from the javas­cript routine (or what it can glean from the noscript image request) straight to the database.

    The ana­lysis, col­lat­ing stat­ist­ics, put­ting together page history/visitor path, etc. is done after the fact when you view the vari­ous reports.

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12. well i thought I would com­ment as I found your site through google and now have been read­ing, and let me say its been very enter­tain­ing, its like find­ing a needle in a hay­stack, find­ing a great read­able blog!!!

    thanks for mak­ing my night
    hi and have a great day from Aus­tralia
    xx Nicola

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13. Wow, you’re actu­ally the Tech­nor­ati #1 blog (although their link poin­ted to zed1.com/ and I had to do some dig­ging to get here). Congratulations!

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14. I havent been blog­ging very long, but I was run­ning a web page from my home pc for a while, so I used to pay close atten­tion just to the server logs, then added Ned­stats, and then site­meter, both free, but both add some more load time.

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15. Online stats ser­vices like the paid Site­meter are good and fairly fast. Watch out for awstats which had some ser­i­ous secur­ity holes (recently). My server was com­prom­ised through this stats package.

    Thanks TechniCool(Australia)

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