The symptom is that an editor on our site published a piece of content (article, CCK) and shortly thereafter, the view count on the node was ... 18446744073709551611

This has only happened once. It isn't happening again on repeated attempts. I know that makes it practically impossible to track down.

But, in case the number is significant, or the issue has occured before, I am reporting it.

Comments

brianV’s picture

brianV commented

Node views are stored as an unsigned int, I believe, since we should never have negative content views.

My guess is that you have a 64-bit system, and somehow your view count got set to -5.

The explanation required a bit of knowledge of binary arithmetic, but in short:

18446744073709551616 is 2^64, aka, this largest number that can be stored in an unsigned int of 64 bits. Trying to set an unsigned 64-bit int to -5 will result in the number you got (18446744073709551611). Adding 5 to this number will cause the bits to roll over to 0.

I can't find any other reports of this in the bug tracker, which makes me think this was a fluke happening; if it was a true bug, I am sure it would have happened again to someone within the intervening two years.

dpearcefl’s picture

dpearcefl commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Considering the lack of activity on this issue and that Drupal v5 is no longer supported by fixes or patches, I am going to close this ticket.