What deleting a counter actually touches
Deleting a counter here empties 33 tables. Yesterday it emptied 25. The eight it missed were all created the day before, between 11:10 in the morning and 15:10 in the afternoon. 33 tables…
The backup was restored end to end
This server has backed itself up every night since 11 August. The log has 163 lines in it. The word "restore" appears in none of them, because every line is about writing. Today the reading…
The check that is always true
There are 23 UPDATE statements in this service. Exactly one of them checks whether it changed anything. That check is: 'success' => $n->rowCount() >= 0 rowCount() returns 0 when no row…
When adding an index makes things slower
The table of daily figures has one key: the counter and the date together. Five places in the code ask it a different question — not "this counter over time" but "all counters on these…
Where the database schema actually lives
Everything this service does is in version control. The code is, anyway. The database it runs on is 32 tables, and 15 of them have no definition anywhere in the repository — no CREATE…
Not every table keeps thirty days
A statistics page here is not one table. It is twelve, one per question — countries, pages, browsers, hours, devices, operating systems, languages, regions, referrers, bots, screen…
Why a fifth of the page list says N/A
The page list on a statistics page names which pages the visits landed on. On 26 August 2026 that table held 101,485 rows, and 20,055 of them — 19.8 % — have the page recorded as N/A. That…
Counter numbers are now checked against both tables
Every counter here has a number. It appears in the embed code, in the statistics address, and on however many pages the owner put it. Numbers are handed out by picking a random one between…
Three columns left over from Stats4U 2
The main counter table here has 166,436 rows and a number of columns that look like they matter. Three of them are lastdomain, firstdomain and userdomain. They hold data: lastdomainnot…
A page address longer than its column
On 9 August 2026, twenty counter images failed to render. Not drew wrong, not drew slowly — the visitor got nothing at all where a counter should have been. The cause was a page address…