On 03/05/10 14:51, Peter Körner wrote: > Gary G: schrieb: >> from my point of view this is a very weak argument - assuming that of course >> counting an integer value and sometimes "print" it does not consume too much >> ressources - how many bytes can it be? probably there are other, more >> promising potentials? > > In theory you're right but it's a quuestion of how efficient the > wikimedia plugin-system and the actual counter plugin is implemented.
It's not a plugin as far as I know, it's a core feature of mediawiki. You will note however that it is turned off on wikipedia itself for exactly the same reason that we have turned it off. The counter is held in the database - it has to be somewhere where all the different server processes can access it so it's not just a matter of incrementing a variable in memory as Gary seems to suggest. That means that every request for a page suddenly gets transformed from a read operation on the database, which can run at the same time as other read operations, into a write operation which needs to lock rows in the hit counter table while it updates the counter. That leads to lock contention between the server processes at times of high load. Tom -- Tom Hughes ([email protected]) http://compton.nu/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
