On dim, 2003-02-02 at 01:56, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

I wonder that we (intl Wikipedias) still have the access counter running, while at the English WP it is disabled.

It was disabled mainly for performance reasons -- for every page view, the database has to be updated with the incremented counter. And lately, we've been getting A LOT of page views; when the updates get backed up waiting for a slow save or other query, everything else has to wait. The English WP gets the vast majority of the traffic, and thus causes the majority of our problems. ;)

The other wikis still run them because there's little benefit to disabling their counters -- lower traffic and smaller databases, so the updates don't get backed up and there's no problem.

However, the counters are so limited that it's not clear just how useful they are -- they don't distinguish been old and recent traffic; they don't distinguish between one person loading a page over and over and ten different people looking at it; they don't distinguish googlebot from a human. They're probably going to get replaced with a smarter counter at some point

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)