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By clancy@culturecat.net on
I just upgraded from one of the 4.5.x versions to 4.6.3, and shortly after that, my Recent Hits, Referrers, Top Users, Top Pages, and the Track Node tab for each post just stopped updating. Cron jobs are running fine, so that's not it. What could have happened? Nothing has changed except for the upgrade, and even then, everything was fine for a couple of days after that.
Comments
Ruling out the obvious
Did your setting to enable tracking statistics somehow get unset? Losing settings can sometimes happen during updates. We had it happen on a number of sites (though not this one in particular).
Laura
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pingVision • scattered sunshine
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Where is that?
Can you tell me how to get there? I went to Admin --> Settings --> Statistics, and everything's enabled, but I didn't see "tracking statistics" there.
CultureCat
That was it
Told you it was obvious. Sorry. Do search the site because other people were posting issues and questions re statistics problems.
Laura
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pingVision • scattered sunshine
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Searching pre posting
I did some searching before posting the question; I'd be really embarrassed to post something that had already been addressed before. I didn't find anything, but I'll keep trying; I very well could have been using the wrong search terms.
CultureCat
cron?
Did cron case running, by chance? (If you're using wget, it could be that your host disabled it, because it's powerful for abusive behavior. Usually an email to support to get cleared for your cron run will address this.)
If you upgraded, but the stats stopped some time after, it could be related to cron. (You also might upload a fresh copy of cron.php, just in case it got corrupted.)
I'm grasping here, but this would fit your symptoms.
Laura
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pingVision • scattered sunshine
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
You may be right
People on my host have been noting problems with stats and cron -- here and here. They are working on a solution, though...
Pete on the first thread I linked to says, "Before the last few weeks' server load issues, stats were running fine for most users including myself. That'll be why it's an advertised feature - it worked for the other 7+ years Site5 have been around. It's not a great shock to me that stats aren't set to run if the server load is high (read: above a certain leve - not neccessarily 10+ and account-crippling) - I'd much rather have my site actually load up than time out just because a stats programme is running. It's just intelligent, server-wide resource saving."
And then Matt Lightner on the third thread I linked says, "This is an issue that has come up in recent management and sysadmin conferences. Essentially we have reached the point where we can justify the addition of one (or possibly several) dedicated machines to be used for processing statistics across our server fleet. This will help reduce server load fleet-wide by taknig stats processing responsibility away from our web servers and move it to a cluster of high-powered data-crunching machines."
This is what makes me think you could be right. Any further thoughts you or anyone else has are much appreciated!
CultureCat
Should not be a problem
Unless your particular server is having problems, your cron jobs should be running. We have many sites on Site5, with no problems with cron. Cron runs should be showing up in your logs ... um, that is if your logs were working.
You might try installing poormanscron.module for now, and see if that helps. You also might double-check that your cron.php file and statistics module uploaded cleanly, and are not corrupted. If you cannot preview them in plain text via your ftp program (or if they contain funny non-standard characters), then they got corrupted or were transferred binary. Replacing them with clean copies ftp'd as text should fix that. Also, you can double check to make sure there are no carriage returns after the php close ('?>') on those files, as sometimes that can cause a problem.
Laura
===
pingVision • scattered sunshine
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
throttle
I assisted Clancy with this and it was the throttle module for 4.6.3 that was affecting the referrer logs. Once it was disabled (the site didn't really need it), the referrers logs began functioning correctly.