WordPress MU

This is in regards to Statpress Reloaded or Statpress Seolution, either one.

Does anybody have any personal experience with deploying this on an MU site with 100+ blogs?

I'm nearing launch on a project, and while I was stoked about deploying it as the statistics plugin for the project, I'm starting to get a little worried about it's potential for bringing things to a standstill.

I've worked with a few clients now who have had some bad experiences with it taking their standalone installations to a crawl - albeit one had a ridiculous 35+ plugins installed in addition to it, to the point where it wouldn't even bring up the options page...

I'd love to hear about personal experience with either of these plugins. I have a feeling that it's a drag on the database mainly due to the fact that it doesn't archive entries older than a few weeks (which you can't see data on anyways, and should be reduced to a single row, imho, to maintain site totals).

I think it is slow enough on my main site. I am using firestats for all mu blogs and it is working fine (~400 blogs atm) , although I like Statpress Seolution much better.

Please post your results if you test this :-)

Any locally stored traffic database plugin is slow and if you use wp-super-cache, it may or may not work. We use one of the wp-shortstat plugins and have it set up to clear data out after 30 days. There's a number of Google Analytics/ Urchin plugins available. Maybe that would be a better solution.

I'm extremely wary about testing it, due to the fact that if I have to bail on it I'll basically be wiping everybodies stats clean and running them into what would most likely just be another guinea pig scenario where the same could happen.

After looking at all the code, while possible, I don't think updating the plugin to aggregrate everything older than X into a single row/seperate is something I can devote time to right now either.

Whatever we go with, the option will be there to disable it and google analytics is going to be an option for anybody who requires more advanced information than any of the current plugins offer.

What about CyStats? It looks promising so far.

Hmm, it hasn't been updated since 2008 it looks like. That's a shame, it looks like it could be a pretty nice stats plugin too.

due to the fact that if I have to bail on it I'll basically be wiping everybodies stats clean and running them into what would most likely just be another guinea pig scenario where the same could happen.

That's one of the reasons why you should be running a testbed. Very little testing should be done on a live wpmu install. (Even though we all do it.)

One solution though is to announce the use of such a plugin for 30 days, tell people that it;s a test, and invite and encourage feedback. That way it looks like you trying to find the best solution for what you need and that should impress end users.

Another solution is to use whatever plugin you want and only make the admin page that displays the results visible to site admins and not end users.

That's one of the reasons why you should be running a testbed. Very little testing should be done on a live wpmu install. (Even though we all do it.)

Oh trust me, I've been around long enough to know this rule of thumb. ;) We haven't launched yet for one, and I'm running a completely seperate (though mirrored) sandbox server where I will test everything before transferring it to the live environment.

I think I'm going to run a(nother) fork of Statpress - the problem with everything else I've looked at is that I need something simple (which shortstats does qualify under) but ultimately beneficial for non-techie types. Statpress gives you a quick and dirty look at what's going on, in a user friendly format, and that's what I want.

The problem is it relies on raw data, and it doesn't aggregate information, which is what it needs to do. 319 queries on the dashboard is a little overkill. 80 queries just to build the chart when it should be one, maybe four tops.

Delays my launch again, but eh. Coding is fun.

I've seen wpmu home pages with higher queue counts. Don't feel bad.

May I make the suggestion of caching the data in the database for say an hour after it's outputted? Take a look in the wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php file for the list blogs function (Sorry, I forget the name of the funtion) for an example of this. The blog count function as well.