Piwik DB tables grow when viewing piwik UI

Support & Bugs
1

I’ve just installed piwik 0.4.3, and I notice that a couple of the piwik MySQL tables grow with every access of the piwik UI (perhaps just the dashboard… not sure). The tables are:

piwik_archive_numeric_2009_08
piwik_archive_blob_2009_08

Here’s the info on the two tables between a single access of the dashboard:

Table     Row number     Data size     Index size     Total size
---------------------------------------------------------------------
piwik_archive_numeric_2009_08      718      38.1 Kb      53 Kb      91.1 Kb
piwik_archive_blob_2009_08     11.2 K     3.3 Mb     397 Kb     3.6 Mb
Total     25049     4.5 Mb     758 Kb     5.2 Mb 

piwik_archive_numeric_2009_08      739      39.3 Kb      57 Kb      96.3 Kb
piwik_archive_blob_2009_08     11.6 K     3.4 Mb     405 Kb     3.7 Mb
Total     25408     4.6 Mb     770 Kb     5.4 Mb

That seems like a non-trivial amount of growth just for one access of the dashboard, and I’m wondering why such an access causes any growth at all.

Is this behavior known and expected? Is it a bug? Is there a configuration item related to this behavior? Have I buggered the piwik install somehow?

Thanks.

2

Normal for browser triggered archiving. See FAQ to switch to archiving via cron.

3

But what, exactly, is new that needs archived when all that’s happened is an admin user accessing the piwik UI? I.e. - the tables are growing despite there being no activity whatsoever on the website that’s actually contributing data via javascript to piwik.

4

Stats of visits, visitors and click are kept in 3 tables that wont change when the admin visit Piwik dashboard.
What is changing when you visit the dashboard is that Piwik will take the data contained in thoses tables and produce two new tables for each month and it’s normal that are growing for months that arent over.
They stop growing when we get to the next month. But Piwik will create 2 new tables for the begining month that will show the same behavior.

5

I apologize if I’m being dense… but the behavior still doesn’t make any sense.

When an admin accesses the piwik dashboard, does that cause only an incremental piece of the non-archived data to get archived, and thus with each dashboard access a little bit more of the data gets processed?

I was under the impression that browser-triggered archiving caused a full archive of any non-archived data, and that was the very reason for encouraging cron-based archiving for sites accruing lots of data – to avoid what would otherwise be a painfully long archive hit as a consequence of merely trying to view the reports.

But that would imply that after you access the dashboard, there would no longer be any non-archived data until such time as the target website registered new visits.

Otherwise the behavior of having the tables grow visibly with each and every dashboard access even though absolutely no new additional data has been logged is befuddling.

6

I’m only talking by experience of what i’ve seen since i use Piwik.

When i access a site dashboard, new visits data get archived.
Next time i visit the dashboard, if the site had new visitors, that new data get processed.

But, it seems Piwik process separatly data for day, week, month and year.
When changing site or time frame, data get processed too.

Archives tables stop been altered (growing) when the month for them is over and that all data for that month still in the visit log have been processed.

7

See also the FAQ: Are Piwik reports real time? http://piwik.org/faq/general/#faq_41