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High database load from Ajax Edit Comments…

2008-11-18

… and a preliminary solution:

The WordPress plugin “Ajax Edit Comments” from The Reader Appreciation Project1 allows the commenter to edit his comment for a certain time – useful especially for typos and minor corrections. (Admins can do more.) Visitors utilize it here for about every 10th comment, by the way.

Now Pierre notified me yesterday about the high number of database queries (and that the response time could be better, too) – higher than what I always saw when logged in. (See the blue footer line.) Doing a little research, I found that it’s the aforementioned Ajax Edit Comments that uses 4 additional database queries for each comment in order to check if the visitor is allowed to edit it (unles (s)he’s logged in as admin who is always allowed to edit). That can sum up to quite a lot if there are many comments on a single post.

I quickly added a little modification to the plugin2 which check the comment age in advance without database access – in my quick tests, these modifications appear to work fine. If you too don’t see any problems – feel free to test it here or maybe later for the music quiz on 16:00 – I will, of course, send the changes to the plugin’s author, hoping they will be included in future versions. :)

  1. for WordPress 2.5 and higher – old version for 2.1–2.3.x here [↩]
  2. in both the old version I’m still using here and the new in my test environment where I’m preparing the WordPress 2.7 update [↩]

Statistical aftermath

2008-11-17

Now what are the results – as far as they concern myself – of the incredible TV muck, erm, “experiment” called “Uri Geller live – Ufos & Aliens” about which I reported more or less live?

  • Uris Aliens: WP.com-Stats A new record on Saturday that didn’t last long: WP.com-Stats counted 2826 page views (probably not 12am CET being their limit, but UTC), including 768 for the pre-report and 1120 for the live report. The best value since the start of my blog, even better than the 2549 in February – also thanks to Uri Geller.
    The visitor run continued on Sunday: 3068 total, 1126 for the pre-report and 809 for the live report. On early Sunday afternoon, the average of the last 6 months was already reached in November.
  • Almost all searchers arrived at the pre-report initially – which I expected and placed a big link there. (And of course this also contributed to the high total page views.) The pre-report was also in Google.de’s top 5 for several search word combinations, sometimes even ahead of ProSieben, the show’s TV station. :mrgreen: And the highest-placed blog.
  • Uris Aliens: Bloggerei Bloggerei.de counted on Saturday until midnight 423 unique visitors1 for the live report, which was enough for no. 12 in the top topics list; there were a total of 1295 visitors on Saturday. (Which also means that another estimated 350-400 visitors were satisfied with the pre-report. Or unsatisfied and left again. Or didn’t notice the link after all.)
    On Sunday, I temporarily reached no. 5 in the top topics and rank 28 in the top blogs list, as far as I noticed (there’s no history) – 2110 unique visitors total, about 700 for the live report.
  • Uris Aliens: Broswer-Statistik Seiten
    Uris Aliens: Broswer-Statistik Besucher     Addendum: Originally I had left out the data from browser-statistik.de in order to not overload this post with numbers, but since Jan, who operates the site, cried so heart-rendingly (“ :cry: ”), I added them now: 2751 pages accessed by 1111 visitors on Saturday, 3061 pages by 2002 visitors on Sunday. Which put me on no. 9 on the charts there.
  • Uris Aliens: whos.amung.us According to whos.amung.us, there were up to 53 online at the same time – even if that tool isn’t known for its reliability, it rather has outages (sometimes for hours) than counting too much.
  • Originally I had planned to update my report in every or every other commercial break – but when there still was none on 9pm (there apparently were rather few commercial customers), I quickly uploaded the first part (in German) anyway; after all, there were already several readers and a few comments.
  • 13 commenters wrote 35 comments during the show; more were added later on – thanks!

The ratings were surprisingly low, rather disastrous for ProSieben – here’s the top 5 of Saturday’s primetime (source: teletexts):

Station Show Viewers
aged 3+		 Marktet share Viewers
14-49 years		 Market share
Sat.1 Chronicles of Narnia (movie) 5.56 Mio. 18.9% 3.25 Mio 27.6%
RTL Das Supertalent (casting show) 5.55 Mio. 18.8% 3.09 Mio. 26.2%
ARD Musikantenstadl (“folk” music) 5.32 Mio. 17.8%
ZDF Unter Verdacht (TV movie) 4.57 Mio. 15.2%
Pro7 Uri Geller live 1.40 Mio. 4.8% 0.85 Mio. 7.3%
Rerun on Sunday morning 0.54 Mio. 6.1% 0.38 Mio. 8.6%

Now does ARD being that far ahead of Pro7 speak for the intelligence of the TV audience or against it…?

  1. 423? 42 and 23 blended together? Conspiracy!!!! [↩]

Publishing your phone number (2)

2008-11-12

old telephone Seems people think that I’m not just a spiritual healing teacher, but also a travel organization… anyway, there was a phone call this morning – since I couldn’t take it at that time, I wanted the answering machine to take it; however that didn’t record it so I only was able to hear parts of it (thanks to speakerphone) – in which a lady referred to my comment on a free vacation from a TV magazine (where only 3 out of 255 dates were actually free).

Actually, she didn’t refer to my comment, but simply to the fact that it’s got the headline “Free VIP vacation”, since she was asking something like whether I were in charge of that, etc., she’d like to travel from the Köln-Bonn airport…

…then the connection was cut – though probably not because the lady noticed she’s at the wrong address; I rather think the answering machins’s to blame (gotta look into that), since she then wrote a mail stating that she’d won a free VIP vacation and wanted to know the total costs with all extra fees for a specific date. And after I had answered that mail, she called again and explained everything (and also apologized).

The fact that she, being (probably) Italian, don’t speak perfect German is, however, in my opinion no reason to assume that, given my post headline, I were such a travel organization – no, exactly that organization from which she won the vacation, from which she actually got a phone number, but that was such an expensive one, she said –, and directly clicks her way to my contact page without reading any of the text beneath the headline. I hope she understands it now, but I’m not completely sure…

I’m really wondering how people like her even manage to learn about such a vacation if they obviously don’t read what they got in front of them.
:shake:

Comment Statistics

2008-11-01

Konna published his comment statistics and thoughts (German) on Thursday – and I thought I could present a few numbers, too.

Now my blog can’t keep up with his regarding the number of comments1, but anyway: There are 3723 entries stored in the comment database that are not spam – including

  • 2039 real visitor comments (including 46 anonymous2),
  • 435 trackbacks/pingbacks,
  • that’s a total of 2474;
  • 1249 comments by me.

Like Konna, I’ll now look at the distribution between men (“Männer” in the graphics) and women (“Frauen”) who gave at least five comments – left: commentators, right: comments:

Kommentatoren

37 men (64.9%) wrote 995 comments (60.9%), that’s an average of 26.9. And 20 women (35.1%) wrote a total of 640 comments (39.1%), average 32.

We see: More men wrote more comments in total, but each woman wrote more than each man.

The Top 10:

Kommentatoren-Top-10

Funny that Konna is here at position 6 just as I am at his. :P

In total, there were 78.4 comments per month (or 95.2 if I include trackbacks like Konna did) and 2.6 (or 3.1) per day – however, there wasn’t much going on in the first three quarters (including posts). So there were 1920 comments (94.2%!) in the past 12 months (160.0 per month, 5.2 per day; or 2289 incl. trackbacks, 190.8/month, 6.3/day) – and only 119 in the 14 months before that!

A great “commentator magnet” is, of course, my music quiz – if I ignore its 35 posts, there are only 1393 comments (without trackbacks) since the start of my blog, i.e. 53.6 per month and 1.8 per day, or 1274 in the past 12 months, i.e. 106.2 per month and 3.5 per day. (And since there are noticebly more men than woman, this explains the entire men/woman distribution.)

Still better than the average of all blogs registered at Blogoscoop – which is below 1 comment per day including those from the blog’s owners –, but there’s still room for improvement – so get writing! :)

 

For those who are interested: Show the SQL queries used here. ▼

  1. but then, my pie charts are prettier ;) [↩]
  2. since I don’t require name and/or email when commenting [↩]

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