Stats lost?

skypanther · March 30, 2009, 12:23am

A long-time client asked me why his site traffic dropped so much last month. (300 pages/day last month, when prior months have been running in the 3000 - 5000/day range) I gave him some standard answers (downturn in economy, etc.) but I was wondering, could stats have been lost? He’s using webalizer to check this info.

Any thoughts?
Tim

Stephen · March 30, 2009, 1:03am

Attempted to download the raw logs and check it?

skypanther · March 30, 2009, 1:35am

No. I was hoping to not have to do that!

If there were no obvious problems (‘we upgraded and lost two weeks of data’) that you know of, then I’ll assume that the stats weren’t lost and his traffic is just down for the month.

Thanks,
Tim

Stephen · March 30, 2009, 1:47am

It depends on server, we changed logging on a few which moved th logging drive, but it would have only affected the day of the move. Th new logging is very IO intensive, and it was making slowness on the servers so we added dedicated logging drives on a number of servers.

skypanther · March 30, 2009, 2:12am

Both sites are on wincf.

Looking at his webalizer, there are days missing for both sites from the current and past months. It’s like webalizer is missing whole days here and there. Strange.

Tim

Stephen · March 30, 2009, 2:25am

this is exactly the problems we are having. I’ve explained it on a few others but basically the new stats generation is terribly buggy, there is a running thread in the psoft/parallels forums about it and also tickets in.

for anyone having AWStats/Webalizer enabled, if they ever had a day with no hits (so for example someone has it enabled by default and makes a subdomain, having it enabled), it freezes all stats generation for the server! Instead of skipping over a 0kb or non existent file, it crashes.

skypanther · March 30, 2009, 2:34am

That certainly would explain the missing days. On the days where stats are there, they do seem to be a bit lower. So, his traffic is probably still off a bit. It’s just hard to know by how much.

Part of the funding for his non-profit business comes from sponsors based on his web traffic. He’s not thrilled that the stats are gone. I guess I’ll have to move him to Google Analytics or something like that (maybe Mint). We’ll see what he says.

Thanks!
Tim