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Traffic limitations

gwcoffey
Minted
Posted on Sep 24, '07 at 07:12 pm

I just ordered mint to try it out, and I’m setting it up now. Before I add tagging, I want to be sure I’m not in for trouble. Are there realistic usage limitations for mint? The site I’ll be tagging isn’t huge, but google analytics reports 1.2 - 1.5 million page views per month. Is this “no problem” or “ummm… maybe…”?

Right now mint is going on the web server itself, and MySQL is on a separate server. If mint works well for us, and we need it, we can easily set up a separate server for mint should the need arise.

BTW, the reason we’re putting mint in the mix is that we want to tie pageview stats back to product data in our back end system for some improved reporting and automation. Google Analytics has no API and no direct access to the data, and their exports seems to be limited to 500 rows at a time. We need to pull down stats for about 20,000 pages every week. I’ll be figuring out how best to do this in mint soon, but if this too is a bad idea, let me know now :)

Thanks,

Geoff

mgoi
Minted
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 08:41 am

Hi Geoff, I’ve been recently minted myself and have nowhere near your traffic levels, but I have discovered a few things which I did not care to look into before buying Mint.

The first limit is the 25MB/5 weeks cache size. It can be upped in the advanced preferences panel, but the developer says that it will greatly affect performance. To access the panel add &advanced to the end of the preferences url, as described in this thread.

Since I’ve installed Mint it’s been a performance hog. It has its own separate database. I am no professional webmaster and my sites are hosted at godaddy. Still it’s the first time I’m seeing such a performance hit, with my page loads being slowed down by 1 to 5 seconds with the Mint js in the header. I am looking into solutions to cut down loading time. The _mint cookie is very heavy; a lot of the third-party pepper add to the load and one should be careful. Nametag in particular is slowing down the process, but I’m keeping it as it does a much better work than secret crush at tracking my phpbb users.

First impressions from a small webmaster, with less than 10,000 hits a day. Still very happy to be minted, trying to improve the experience.

Sam Brown
Third-Party Pepper Developer
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 09:46 am

1.2 - 1.5 million page views per month. Is this “no problem” or “ummm… maybe…”?

I’ve hit 3 million page views per month without any problem at all.

I am running thin Mint on the same server that runs my site, and its no resource hog. It is up there with the CSS as the most hit file obviously but its nothing serious. Runs perfectly.

gwcoffey
Minted
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 09:58 am

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Sam, at the risk of sounding dumb, what’s “thin mint?”

I’ve got mint running on a test server now, and the live site is tagged. So far everything seems to be going fine. It has logged about 15,000 visits since last night. I’m going to let it go for a little longer and see how it holds up during the busy late-morning period.

Geoff

mgoi
Minted
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 10:05 am

“thin Mint” is just the default pepper with the backup/restore pepper. It will certainly improve pageload time in my case, but then again it defeats the purpose of choosing Mint over urchin or statcounter… Mint is less attractive to me without the pepper ;) Still working on performance, maybe by including the mint.js only at strategic gateways on my sites.

If you guys have any leads, please do not hesitate to share them.

TIA

Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 10:36 am

As with any server-side script, it’s performance is going to depend greatly on the fitness of your server and specifically database server. You can find more opinions on traffic limitations in this thread

mgoi
Minted
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 10:54 am

Thanks for the link to the thread Shaun. Appreciate the quick reply! If Geoff or anyone could share their url that would be a great way to look at performance with firebug.

Will look into server-side tweaks before installing more pepper.

PS to the newbies like me: disabling a pepper will not affect performance. you must uninstall it.

Sam Brown
Third-Party Pepper Developer
Posted on Sep 25, '07 at 12:15 pm

Sam, at the risk of sounding dumb, what’s “thin mint?”

Mint without any additional Pepper. That said, I have got UA007 installed.

gwcoffey
Minted
Posted on Sep 29, '07 at 02:26 am

Just a followup to complete this thread. We put Mint on a test server, tagged the live site, and let it run for 24 hours. It went swimmingly. So I moved Mint to the production web server, and it is humming along perfectly. I tagged the site at 11:00 this morning, and it has logged 25,000 visits in the last 12 hours. Database load averages were unaffected, and or course there was no appreciable impact on the web server.

Mint is great stuff. I already bought another license for another customer, and I’ll be buying it for my own site with our next upgrade. I can see putting this on every site I work on. It is addictive fun to watch the numbers, and ridiculously easy to install and tag.

Thank you so much.

Geoff

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