Comments on: More Visitors, More Stats

By: TechniCool

TechniCool — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 21:49:58 +0000

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)

By: Richard Smith

Richard Smith — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:46:18 +0000

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.

By: Spong Bo

Spong Bo — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:00:24 +0000

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!

By: nicola

nicola — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:41:23 +0000

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

By: mike

mike — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 19:28:10 +0000

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.

By: PJ Brunet

PJ Brunet — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:50:18 +0000

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.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 22:28:49 +0000

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.

By: PJ Brunet

PJ Brunet — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 19:25:35 +0000

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.

By: mike

mike — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:23:06 +0000

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

By: AJ

AJ — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:43:38 +0000

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