More useless nonsense

Nao

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #30, on June 29th, 2013, 04:12 PM »
This consideration might have been important years ago, but nowadays web hosting is generally done on powerful CPUs with lots of RAM etc, and an extra SQL query (or not) is usually not so important... Just look at the Wedge codebase, literally for every page it runs dozens of preg calls, many queries, does thousands of tests, and yet you're aware that our software is extremely fast, because most of the work is done over the network and the client, more than the server, so is it that big a deal, anyway..?

In any case, I'd at least like to keep the topic views enabled for members, and drop guests altogether, I wouldn't mind that too much really, but that's really the best I can do right now, I reckon...

Arantor

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #31, on June 29th, 2013, 06:07 PM »
See, that's the sort of attitude that vBulletin has - 'the server is crazy fast so we don't need to be so careful' and it's why they end up with 60+ queries every page.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. More importantly, though, remember that every cycle taken up by one run is a cycle not available for other users on the same server. The bigger and meaner Wedge is, the fewer concurrent users it can support.

In this particular case, I sort of agree with you, that an extra query may not be so important. But what the query *is* can be. Right now the installer pushes everything to MyISAM. Updating a MyISAM table even for a single row means a full table lock. The topics table is not a fixed width table and as such it doesn't get the extra boost for such tables.

There is a surprising amount of work being carried out by the server each page run, and more than it needs to be.
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live627

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #32, on June 29th, 2013, 08:04 PM »
Quote
Right now the installer pushes everything to MyISAM
Couldn't it be modified to push InnoDB without worries?
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Arantor

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #33, on June 29th, 2013, 08:28 PM »
There are side issues with InnoDB... it's possible but very awkward to disable MyISAM but it's easy to disable InnoDB and some hosts still do. Fortunately as MySQL/MariaDB 5.5+ get adopted, it is becoming less common for InnoDB to be disabled. But right now it's still pretty common.

live627

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godboko71

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #35, on June 29th, 2013, 10:34 PM »
@Nao you are over estimating hosts, the average site is on shared hosting, most of which is oversold. Almost be nice it stats where a plugin.
Thank you,
Boko

Arantor

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #36, on June 29th, 2013, 11:56 PM »
Actually making it a plugin isn't a huge problem for the most part.

Nao

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #37, on June 30th, 2013, 12:24 AM »
What if we rename views to something else like reach or popularity, then we can get away with counting only members..? Also, maybe count only one visit per member?

Arantor

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #38, on June 30th, 2013, 12:44 AM »
Counting a view per member implies tracking who's seen what, something we currently don't do, but something a surprising number of people seem to want to do (and we can't do it based on read status because that gets purged by board-read-status)

Here's a thought... the view count is screwed in any case because while you navigating a multipage topic won't count views, if you view a topic, then there's a reply, then you view it later to see the reply, that's now two views.

emanuele

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #39, on June 30th, 2013, 09:20 PM »
Quote from Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:45 PM
I find it interesting that WordPress does not keep a view count per article. Or if it does, it's not actually shown in their ACP anywhere I can find. I wonder what the logic of not doing so is.
Nope, no tracking (and I remember quite well because I installed the counterize plugin with a lot of stats...except after very few time I run out of db space (cheap Italian host :angel: ) because of it and I deleted everything without any regret (except that I wanted to improve it, but never found time to make the changes I wanted) and moved to an external tool, and then forgot about the external tool, I think it's still there somewhere lol)
Quote from Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:45 PM
There are certainly cases on sm.org of threads having obscenely high view counts unnaturally quickly (rising tens of thousands inside an hour)
Yep, I remember some of those, it was funny to see the number increase refresh after refresh... LOL

Arantor

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Re: More useless nonsense
« Reply #40, on July 4th, 2013, 06:47 PM »
OK, so it's been a few days since I started this debate off.

I've periodically checked the 'most online' stat through that time and since I actually added some of the bots to it that we're seeing, I can't remember the last time when the number of guests actually exceeded the number of bots. Like right now - 8 Guests, 3 Users (0 Contacts, 7 Spiders) - as in, of the 8 guests we have right now, 7 are bots.

I'm actually skeptical of half the guests we have, too. I've seen blatantly fake user agents (one that just says 'Mozilla' which no browser I know uses), I've seen a disproportionately high number of Opera users, and a lot of Firefox users going back to versions anywhere between 3.5 and 15, typically 12-15.

And if we remove bots from this count, it's going to look lower than before, of course which will cause lots of ERMAHGERD MA STATS IS LOWERZ for convertees. And if we keep it, we drastically exaggerate the counts of users and hits which is how come the hit rate is 8-10x higher than what Google Analytics reports.