Forum Stats - Bug

[col]

Hi,

Why are the 'views' stats for most threads zeroed? Just wondering. Perhaps it is just a temporary server glitch.

[col]

Logged back in to add: I also observe that the 'Users Online in the Last 24 Hours' list is empty.

[newey]

Hmmm. The only thing I can think of is that ReTrEaD reset us from using actual time to elapsed time, as per the poll we took. Doing so may have reset those stats.

[reTrEaD]

It's a ProBoards system issue, not just GN2. Should be fixed in short order.

[col]

Hmmm. If Proboards have mistakenly zeroed all those view numbers in the database, it might be tricky to correct. They will not go to a backup (as all interim content would be lost), and trying to splice-in those fields numbers from a back-up would seem like a herculean task. Hopefully that's the worst of snafu.

[col]

Well, it seems that underestimated Proboards! 'Users logged in in past 24 hours' has been reset again, but most the view stats are back. It seems that only the most recent threads are at zero / starting from scratch. Proboards must have retrieved the old data for old threads and over-written the zeroed values. Of course, they would hold no such data from backups for newer threads. I guess, at the same time, the 'users logged in the past 24 hours' list must have been reset again. Well, it now seems to be (pretty much) where it all should be.

[sumgai]

col,


Backup procedures have certainly 'advanced' since our days of just copying everything en masse. In point of fact, PB keeps a separate database for each totalized datum, with unique keys for each Board. In this way, they can arrive at their own internally necessary statistics, and not have to sift through hundreds of thousands of Boards to arrive at the desired figures. They may also have a master backup, a 'whole enchilada' if you will, but that would be just as costly to delve into for stats like we're talking about. And who wants to hazard the risk of an accident as one fishes around for data, even on a backup set? To me, that backup set is Gold, not to be touched unless absolutely necessary... above and beyond the day-to-day business workings.

At least, that's how I would do it, because experience as taught me that you can never:

be too rich;
be too skinny;
nor
have too many backup sets!

sumgai

[col]

Hi sumgai,

Yes, reading over at Probaords support forum, it seems that's how they do it. I read that the thread view totals and the data about members logged in over the previous 24 hours are stored within the same database, so that explains why the 'logged in' data was started over again. I did not realise that this is how they would share the load across servers. I probably would have guessed that they split off whole forums. But I'm sure they have very good reasons for they have organised this. Probably makes much more sense to you.