Uncategorized
FireStats Data Burned Our Blog (A Caution to Other Bloggers)
We apologize to our readers for the blog downtime for the past few days. Access to Scrumptious during that time would have resulted to an ‘Internal Server Error’ page.
I noticed the problem about 2 hours after publishing my Mio post (I would have entitled this as ‘Mio Killed Our Blog, So How About Some Yui?’, but decided to take the more informative approach). I reported the issue to the Animeblogger support staff. Maestro determined that the problem stemmed from long-term use of the FireStats plugin.
FireStats is a free web statistics system we’ve been using for the past 2 years. Just imagine all the accumulated data and we’ve never purged any of those records since. According to the support’s feedback, approximately 2 million rows worth of FireStats data riddled our blog database, taking about 400MB of space. Processing that much data really hurt performance, slowed down page loads, and eventually, it ate up all the server memory causing the blog to crash (and burn).
It would be wise for FireStat users to keep close tabs on its database and memory usage. In addition, I only recently learned that there is a built-in automatic compact feature. Activating it will cause FireStats to archive old data on user-defined intervals to lessen database bloating. I do not know if we could have prevented the problem if we used it, but it might spell the difference for other users.
As for alternatives, I would suggest non-integrated website analysis solutions to avoid taxing the server with additional workload, such as Google Analytics. This post lists a few other choices along with a brief description. If you guys have other recommendations, please do share.
I’d also like to take this time to thank Maestro and the AB support staff for quickly assessing and fixing the problem.
So, yeah, WE’RE BACK! I’ll post something some updates soon. And, Scrumptious turned 2 recently, same time we started to experience problems 
A big belated ‘Happy Birthday’ to us!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Related posts:
filed under: Discussion
16 comments for “FireStats Data Burned Our Blog (A Caution to Other Bloggers)”
Trackbacks
Post a comment
The Rotating Blogroll
Its better if you dont use that freakin’ plugin anymore so your site will be safe.
So much win on the insert image.
Man that must suck. I use a different plugin for certain statistics and also have another, GoStats (which uses Google Analytics it seems) to track daily stats. So far it has worked for me since it is a third party thing and all I do is add the counter/tracker to my blog.
Anyways glad to see you back.
I think the FireStats CRASH AND BURN also affected the other blogs in the same server we were in, THAT, Subculture, etc… oh boy
But yeah, we’re back, woohoo! 
I don’t think this is the only one. Many of the WP plugins EAT space like crazy (or like Kirby). I did a cleanup from a stat plugin and wrote this:
Nowadays I offload that stuff to WP-stats or Google Analytics. Both are fast and both keep the data on their own servers.
I use Google Analytics for Rosetta Code. My only real complaints about it are that it doesn’t work if the user doesn’t use Javascript, and that there are pieces of information that are available in my Apache access logs that I have no way of getting through the GA interface. (I don’t recall any off-hand, aside from IP address, which I’m not interested in.) It’d be nice if I could get a DB dump of their representation of my data.
Happy Belated anniversary!
That does suck. But glad to see you back. And happy belated second anniversary. :3
Yeah, I notcied a couple of animeblogger.net blogs seemed to have gotten hit by the 500 errors. Glad you guys are back though and happy belated anniversary
.
Hi,
I am the author of FireStats.
sorry to hear about your incident.
as you noticed – there is a built in feature to compact old records automatically. also – if your have been using an old version it would have definitely created more load on the server than it should have.
for best performance and storage efficiency, use the latest firestats on mysql 4.1.14 or newer to allow archiving support in FireStats.
mysql 5.x is recommended though.
I have been running FireStats on my own server for 3 years now, and it does not create any performance issues with over 2 million hit stored using around 200mb of disk space (you can see actual tables size inside FireStats settings tab).
I suggest you guys to just use google analytics. Belated 2nd Anniversary too!
Happy Birthday! Ah the advantages of low-maintenace wordpress
I’m sorry to hear that, oh well, Happy belated 2nd Anniversary.
@Kairu Ishimaru We stopped using the FireStats plugin altogether at Maestros request. And, I just added that image very last minute
@Panther Were glad to be back. Ill try to look into that GoStats. I miss the real time stats that come along with integrated systems though.
@Kabitzin Before, we used GA in parallel with FireStats. Now, we just soley rely on GA. It is quite troubling that a lot of WP plugins misuse server resources so much. I wonder if we should pool together and come up with a list of safe plugins for co-anibloggers to use.
@Michael Mol Hmm yeah, GA doesnt provide a way for users to download their data from them. They do provide a multitude of tools to manipulate the data.
@ghostlightning @TheBigN @TJ @foomafoo @tflops Thanks! Hope well enjoy another fruitful year of blogging and thank you for always delighting us with your company
@Omry Thanks for your recommendation on the optimized FireStats setup. I believe we were using the old version, Im not sure because it was my co-author who was managing the site for the better part of the year.
@Omisyth LOL. Yeah, sometimes it is hard. But, Maestro and AB are always quick to remedy these small hiccups.
Happy second aniversary! It’s nice to see a metapost about the more technical aspects of blogging.
Great to have you back! And congratulations on reaching this important milestone.
As a blogger with over 2 years of experience (dang, slipped into a Horioism there) and next-to-zero techie knowledge – even HTML is still mostly Greek to me – I find that my noob status in matters technological confers a critical benefit: I’m not tempted to tweak with the defaults because I don’t know how. End result is a plain-as-heck site, but a pretty stable one.
@Seleria: GA doesn’t allow you to download the raw data (I’ve got apache logs I can fall back on for that), but you can export any report or view you can build as CSV or XML, and even have them emailed to you automatically. I did that so I could build a couple reports that I couldn’t figure out how to do using their data.