ND Holmes Wrote:
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> While I definitely see Roger's point, as I
> responded to his email, view counters are brutal
> on overall performance. Every time somebody hits
> a page it has to go update records to track those
> views. Databases are typically optimized either
> for read access where the number of reads swamp
> the number of writes, or for write access where
> you need to do lots of updates but very few
> queries. It's very difficult to make a database
> do both well without some serious design and
> serious iron backing it up. NGDF, and most
> internet sites, are the former - lots of reads,
> few writes. Plus, since the data is fairly
> static, caching works very well and we can usually
> skip the database query entirely. If you have
> view counters on, the cache goes to hell and you
> have to do the DB query every single time. Pretty
> much every guide to setting up Phorum (the BB
> software that runs NGDF) will tell you that view
> counters are one of your top performance gremlins.
>
>
> Don and I had view counters on at several points
> in the past, and had to disable them because they
> were just killing performance as our number of
> users and visitors continued to grow. That was
> several years back, and our page views have
> skyrocketed since then.
>
> I told Roger he's more than welcome to post links
> if he wants to send visitors to his own site so
> that he has metrics on the number of views. I
> appreciate his posts and enjoy looking at them, as
> do most of us, and I certainly don't want anyone
> to be of the opinion that I'm discouraging his
> posts. I Unfortunately his request just isn't one
> I can accommodate right now, because at the moment
> it's a trade-off, and I'm prioritizing good
> overall performance over view counters. Until
> such point that NGDF moves onto bigger hardware
> (and that's not going to happen until my life is a
> little less under water, maybe in a year or so),
> enabling them just isn't an option.
Thank you for your post Nathan.
