Sometimes every page view counted as one visit. Bug in Piwik?

I have a serious problem with my Piwik. Sometimes, the visitor counter is raised with every page view. This happens only on some visitors, let’s say about 1%.

Here you can see a peak at 17h, which was caused by only one vistor:
[attachment 12 visits_time.jpg]

Here the visitor log:
[attachment 14 visitorlog.jpg]

I checked the database table with a SQL-Query. The “cnt”-column shows the number of visits of an unique user in one hour. It should’t be higher than 2, because my visit_standard_length is 1800.
[attachment 16 sql2.png]

The SQL query shows, that this problem happens only on some specific visitors (same “visitor_idcookie” in different row). Most of them are Firefox users. Perhaps a cookie problem?

With this issue I can not trust the Piwik results any more. :S

I already posted this topic in the German support forum, but I got no answer: 301 Moved Permanently

I tried to look at the last screenshot you sent.

I couldn’t find 2 entries with the same cookie id with a time span less than 30 minutes. Have I missed something?

On the second screenshot, you can see the symbol of a returning visitor (it’s a human head&torso with a green arrow on top of it). Meaning Piwik recognized it’s a returning visitor.

It seems the data you provided doesn’t permit yet to conclude the peek is caused by one user only.

On which other information do you base the hypothesis ?

is this a real bug? i want to install piwik on my blog

Yes, you missed something. :smiley:

My SQL query has a “GROUP BY” statement! Without the bug, this SQL query shouln’t return any rows! The first row shows 60 visits (“cnt” column) from one unique user (grouped by the same cookie id). This corresponds exactly with the peak of my first graph.

This is the query I used. Be careful: Don’t use it on large “piwik_log_visit” tables, it can take a long time!


SELECT DATE_FORMAT( visit_last_action_time,  '%Y.%m.%d %H' )  `time` , COUNT( idsite ) cnt, idsite, idvisit, visit_last_action_time,  `visitor_idcookie` ,  `location_ip` 
FROM piwik_log_visit
WHERE visit_exit_idaction_url = visit_entry_idaction_url
GROUP BY  `time` , visitor_idcookie
HAVING cnt >2
ORDER BY  `time` DESC

I figured out, that the problem exists since I’ve installed Piwik on March 2010. My Piwik version is 1.0.

Of course I recognized that. You have to look at the time and IP adress! The first 8 entries are from the same visitor (same IP and same configuration; I cut the IP for privacy reasons). Those entries were made within 1 minute. There is only one page view per row (the url’s are different). The last 2 entries are from 2 different returning visitors.

I don’t know whether this bug exists only on my Piwik installation, but I think it has something to do with the cookies Piwik uses.

My recommendation: You should install Piwik, it’s a great piece of software! If this is a bug (that happens in very rare cases) I’m sure that it will be fixed soon.

Sorry for failing to understand the SQL query you gave.

Does this mean someone did 60 requests within 1 second to your website ? Is your website a “standard” (ie. content) website or some web application ?

I’m now asking the forum is there could be a “race condition” in this particular context, could it explain the abnormal count ?

No! Normal page views about every 5 - 10 seconds, nothing special. Like every other visitor on my site (about 400 visits a day). You can see the time in the visitor log (2nd picture). My site is a normal CMS and I already checked my Apache log files - nothing suspicious. It’s definitly no race condition!

It must have something to do with the cookies AND the configuration of the browser of those visitors (perhaps a personal firewall that blocks some cookies for writing ?).

Sorry, I didn’t respond sooner. Yes, 1.0 is missing a GROUP BY. Matt fixed this a while ago in trunk. It’ll be in the 1.1 release.

ps this only applies to the live Visitor. Visits/visitors are counted correctly in the summary tables (archive processing).

Tobe,
I think there is a bug indeed, this shouldn’t happen. The fix vipsoft mentioned is not going to fix this issue I believe.

Can you please contact me by email matt att piwik.org and send me your DB dump (log_* tables) for the few days where it is not working?

thanks

Hi there,

I have the same problem. I had about 3 peaks in my stats provoked by one user (same visit cookie).

Attached you can find the result of tobe’s group by query…

regards,
Wolfgang

I created a ticket there: Edge case: each page is a new visit · Issue #1916 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub

I have the same problem and also has database error when first setup. I reset the cookie and the problem is gone, very strange.

[quote=santacruz]
I have the same problem and also has database error when first setup. I reset the cookie and the problem is gone, very strange.[/quote]

Did you encounter the problem on your firefox? Do you use any ad-blocker?
I asked the visitor who provoked the problem on my site. He uses the company network/computer. They use McAffee ANtivirus but he don’t know any details.

hmm…i got same problem.very frustrating.

I never tried Fire Fox. I do use the IE and yes I have the ad-blocker install.
I will try to duplicate the problem on Firefox.

BTW, at my site I use the google analytics for backup counter.

Santacruz