What a web server writes down
Every web server on the internet maintains an automatic record of its activities, completely independently of any installed measurement tools or visible counters. This record is known as…
Deleting is not hiding
Terminating a digital service requires more than simply removing a graphic from a web layout. When a website operator decides to stop measuring traffic, the subsequent deletion process must…
What a counter has to store at all
Operating a visitor tally requires processing specific technical information during each access event. Understanding the exact technical boundary between strictly necessary data processing…
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. How…
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…
What image-only counting and JavaScript each measure
Stats4U can count through a plain image or through its JavaScript integration. Those methods do not supply the same information. A counter can increase while the page report contains only a…
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: lastdomain not…