Dumb question regarding hits

On a forum, what defines the hits? For example, does every smilie and every image that is hosted on adminaddict count as a hit?

Do images that are linked from other sites count as a hit?

We went from 530,000 hits yesterday to 965,000 hits today.



I suspect this is as a result of people simply sitting and refreshing the pages over and over in hopes of new news, but I would like to help cut back on that.

Is there a way to know how many hits one of my pages is generating so that i can reduce them?

Thanks

 

A hit in a log analyzer is any file request. So if you have a page with a hundred pictures on it and haven't set an expires header, every time that thread is viewed, it will generate a hundred hits.

Best to just set an expires header, really : )

 

I will try to find out how to do that.

:o

I feel so dumb amidst all the brain power here sometimes.

 

Peacelily - Don't! That was a great question!

Vek - can you talk a little more about the "expires header?" I think there is an auto option for that in vB.... am I right?

Thanks!
RR

 

Hey Peacelily,

I'll add this....what is the impact, positive/negative of this? :killpc2:

 

Are you reading my mind? I was just wondering about that.

 

It may be that if she asks her membership to click on 'new posts' that would have less of a load than clicking 'refresh' while viewing a forum.

 

It's not a vBulletin option, it's a webserver option. If your webserver supports .htaccess (any Apache server), you can turn it on by placing this in the file:

Code:

# Turn it on
ExpiresActive On

# Set a default expiry time. One hour is fine, but a day or longer may be appropriate.
ExpiresDefault A3600

# Turn expiry off for dynamic content (or potentially dynamic content).
ExpiresByType application/x-httpd-php A0
ExpiresByType application/x-python-code A0
ExpiresByType text/html A0

<FilesMatch "\.(php|py|pyc|pyo)$">
ExpiresActive Off
</FilesMatch>

Is my current setting - it tells the browser to cache non-php, non-html, non-python scripts for an hour. That means if they see the file again up to an hour later, they won't even ask your site if it's changed - they will go straight to their cache.

 

Sorry I thought it was the "Add No-Cache HTTP Headers" option. :doh:

Thanks for the clarification!
RR

 

What does that option do?

 

Why would you not want people staying on your site?

 

I am not sure I understand the question? I want people on our site, I just want to help our site stay up when people are there and just refreshing every 10 seconds to see if a new reply has been posted during a live event.

Last time it happened, our hits went from .5 million hits to 1 million hits without corresponding amounts of post counts or other activity. It was simply because of people refreshing and refreshing and refreshing. Just looking for a workaround.

 

That sort of thing is frequently caused by web crawlers.

 

Add new content for them to look at :p