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Symptom

You have added a visitor counter to your website. Since then the website creates a higher CPU load and became slower.

Cause

Many visitor counters write each transaction into a database table. This requires at least two transactions: First the current counter value is read and increased by one. The result is then stored to the database. This is an unnecessary extra load already, because each transaction that a visitor does on a website requires an additional read/write cycle of the database.

This is highly problematic, because many visitor counters do not use their own tables, but use existing tables with foreign indices. Wordpress plugins for instance frequently store their data to the wp_options table. On each write operation, the indices of the table must be re-calculated. These write operations come at high costs (in terms of CPU load and calculation time). Frequent write operations slow down all of the system.

Solution

We recommend not to use visible vistor counters on a website. First, counters make only sense psychologically, when they show big numbers (“1 mio burgers sold”), because only then they suggest social proof and tempt more customers to buy. Second, you will normally not want your competitors to know how many visitors your website gets. Instead of a visible visitor counter you can use the much more detailed and daily updated website statistics of your web hosting plan.

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