Missing custom variable tracking & issue with 'use cookie to prevent count of own visits' option

Support & Bugs
1

i’ve been testing piwik for a month or so and generally i like it.
i decided to add some custom variables for my site, using the blogs here as a reference.

my pages now correctly list a piwik variable for visitortype (guest or member) and also for the name of any group on my site that is being viewed (like a category).

however… in testing this, i found two issues.

  1. the total for the visitortype name variable is being counted and shown in the custom variables widget, but the values for the visitortype (guest or member) do not appear.
  2. i previously enabled the ‘use cookie to prevent my own views of the site being tracked’ option and now i have disabled it to test the group variables myself… my views are not being tracked even though the cookie option is disabled and i have cleared the cache and cookies in my browser (chromium).

anyone have any idea why this might be? what can i change or explore to resolve this?
thanks

2

update to this… i found 502 and 500 errors in the browser console:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=CustomVariables&action=ge…t=1&viewDataTable=table&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 502 (Bad Gateway) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=Referers&action=getWebsit…idget=1&filter_limit=10&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 502 (Bad Gateway) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=Referers&action=getSocial…taTable=tableAllColumns&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=VisitorInterest&action=ge…&viewDataTable=graphPie&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 502 (Bad Gateway) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=Referers&action=getSearch…t=1&viewDataTable=table&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 502 (Bad Gateway) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=VisitsSummary&action=getE…idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05&viewDataTable=sparkline
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error) http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=Referers&action=getKeywords&widget=1&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-07%2C2013-02-05

so searching the web i found this was suggested (crontab): How to Set up Auto-Archiving of Your Reports - Analytics Platform - Matomo
i setup the crontab as suggested here… no change.

i also found references to changing the fastcgi buffer sizes… so tried that. which did alter the errors that were produced and the speed of the page rendering… but didn’t end the errors… these are the settings i presently use (the server only has 512MB ram available presently and i have an intensive app in there other than piwik):
fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
fastcgi_buffers 16 256k;

anyone inspired to share what i might be missing?
thanks

3

when you get error 500, check the server error logs , is there any more info?

4

thanks for assisting… the logs are mainly a reflection of what appears in the browser console:

2013/02/07 05:29:32 [error] 20051#0: *25838 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: xx.xx.xx.xx, server: visits.infiniteeureka.com, request: “POST /index.php?module=Referers&action=getSearchEngines&widget=1&viewDataTable=table&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-08%2C2013-02-06 HTTP/1.1”, upstream: “fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000”, host: “visits.infiniteeureka.com”, referrer: "http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=range&date=previous30"
2013/02/07 05:29:32 [error] 20051#0: *25852 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: xx.xx.xx.xx, server: visits.infiniteeureka.com, request: “POST /index.php?module=Referers&action=getKeywords&widget=1&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-08%2C2013-02-06 HTTP/1.1”, upstream: “fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000”, host: “visits.infiniteeureka.com”, referrer: “http://visits.infiniteeureka.com/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=range&date=previous30”

5

so i still haven’t resolved this…
i am seeing that the real-time traffic widget is showing (at least some) visits, but the other widgets mostly don’t load and the main traffic graph is showing zero traffic since the glitches began.

are there any nginx experts here who are willing to assist? i think most likely it is an nginx config issue.
thanks

6

Check your nginx error logs ?

7

aha. i found two php fatal errors that i had missed before:

2013/02/08 20:43:56 [error] 20051#0: *104119 FastCGI sent in stderr: “PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Cannot instantiate trait (null) in /var/www/html/mysite/piwik/core/View.php on line 43” while reading response header from upstream, client: xx.xx.xxx.xx, server:mysite, request: “POST /index.php?module=Referers&action=getWebsites&widget=1&filter_limit=10&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-09%2C2013-02-08 HTTP/1.1”, upstream: “fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000”, host: “mysite”, referrer: "http://mysite/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-09,2013-02-08"
2013/02/08 20:43:57 [error] 20051#0: *104121 FastCGI sent in stderr: “PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Nesting level too deep - recursive dependency? in /var/www/html/mysite/piwik/core/View.php on line 43” while reading response header from upstream, client: xx.xx.xxx.xx, server:mysite.com, request: “POST /index.php?module=Referers&action=getSocials&widget=1&viewDataTable=tableAllColumns&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-09%2C2013-02-08 HTTP/1.1”, upstream: “fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000”, host: “mysite.com”, referrer: “http://mysite.com/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=range&date=2013-01-09,2013-02-08”

8

so i’ve been attempting to fix this… and altering the setup to configure ssl too… and noticed on one blog that someone said piwik does not support self signed certificates… which is what i am using…
could that be the cause of these issues? i haven’t seen more info on that anywhere.

9

lol…
i saw an out of memory error in there…
piwik attempted to allocate 16777216 terabytes of ram… (measured in bytes)… my 512MB was insufficient. (:P)

10

16777216 is 16M not 512M

11

no, the number in bytes was vast… i didn’t paste the number in bytes. i converted the number in bytes to terabytes and posted that.

12

You didn’t do that correctly im afraid ?

13

i think you have misunderstood what i am saying…
if you convert 16777216 terabytes into bytes, that is the total number of bytes that the system attempted to allocate…
since i do not have 16 million terabytes of RAM available (i have 512MB of RAM), there was an out of memory error.
why the number was so large, i do not know.

14

yesterday i attempted to login and piwik generated a fatal out of memory error… then a 502 error from nginx.
today i can login and the widgets are all displaying correctly.
so ‘something’ has reset somewhere.
i’ll share here if i find more.

15

i have apparently fixed this now by altering the nginx and php-fpm configs, in relation to tips on this page:

http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2011/nginx-and-php-fpm-configuration-and-optimizing-tips-and-tricks/

if anyone’s interested…

edit: oh… first load was ok… 2nd has caused the same issue as previously… modules not loading… server has sufficient empty ram… i will continue exploring.