On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 01:56:13PM -0700, Aerik Sylvan wrote:
Do I correctly remember that mediawiki projects do not keep log files and statistics and stuff (other than the ones that can be gleaned from the database itself) to reduce server load? I think I remember somebody saying the even log files are not kept... or that could have been some other reality.
Well, it's the reality I'm in. No log files are being written on the squids or the apaches.
I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
And a few other things, but nothing that looks like it would answer some of the questions being asked.
So - hitting an external log with the standard client issued image / javascript type counter thingy would get some of that. More data could be gleaned by combining that with the info available from the database.
Has this already been discussed/beaten to death? Is it a dumb idea?
Some Wikipedias have systems like this set up. According to the statistics of the German Wikipedia, a user's discussion page is the second most visited page, with 10% less hits than the main page. So, apparently this method is not producing very reliable data.
The most accurate method would be to make the squid servers send short UDP messages to a central log server. This would not hit the performance of the squids very much, and the log server could aggregate data before writing it to disks from time to time.
Regards,
JeLuF