Mint Forum

one update - i have no peppers installed beyond what comes from the factory - it’s a base install

i dont believe anything has changed - the website loads just fine now that i removed the mint code - i will try reinstalling mint and see if that helps. it’s really disappointing that I can’t use Mint the last couple of days.

It is most likely a database server issue. Start by uninstalling any Pepper added since the problem appeared. If that fixes, a Pepper was at fault. Have you updated Mint recently? If so, Mint may be at fault. Check with your host and ask if they have made any changes to your server or database that might explain a decrease in performance. If you are on a shared server you might ask that they look into other sites on the server hogging resources.

I just received this email from my webhost (top notch tech people):

============================ Our technicians have noticed that your MySQL databases are running more slowly than they are for most customers. We’ve investigated this, and it turns out to be because a script on the site is modifying a single item in the “mintstats” database tens of thousands of times a day — more than once a second on average. Each day, it’s writing several gigabytes of data, but the data all appears to be the same, or at least very similar.

Specifically, the database query that’s being run begins like this:

UPDATE mint__config SET cfg = ‘a:25:{s:13:"activationKey";s:17:"…";s:8:"siteRoot";s:0: [… long data omitted …] ’ WHERE id=1;

We don’t know why this is happening, but it’s not something we see with other customers. It looks like it might be doing a database write for each page view, which slows down your site quite a bit.

======================

I LOVE the real time analytics mint provides, but if my site is taking a performance hit (pretty busy site) I’m going to have to remove it (sooo hate to do that). Any suggestions or ideas what the problem is here?

I work for Tiger Technologies, the hosting company mentioned by zigz.

The response that “Mint is working as designed” is a little surprising.

I want to emphasize that Mint is writing about 2 GB of data a day to MySQL for this site, but almost none of that data actually changes on each write. It’s updating an almost identical multi-KB “mint__config” database row over 100,000 times a day.

Our profiling shows that this single activity outweighs the rest of the site’s script/database load combined. During busy times, the simultaneous database UPDATEs can block each other, leading to measurable increases in script loading time. Database writes are extremely resource intensive compared to just running PHP code or doing database reads.

While it’s not causing any actual problems (we can certainly “handle the load”), our customer has indicated that he’s concerned about maximizing site performance at the millisecond level, and this is by far the main performance bottleneck on a fairly complex site.

We’ve looked closely at what Mint is storing, and almost all of the row data is identical on each write. Are you saying that Mint is designed to rewrite several KB of almost entirely unchanging data to disk for every page view — including irrelevant data like the activation key — just to track a few bytes of changed data (such as total and unique visitors)?

If so, we think that makes Mint inappropriate for any site with more than a few tens of thousands of page views per day. When performance really matters, a system that performs gigabytes of unnecessary disk writes is not a good choice.

If one aggregate value changes — say, the number of unique visitors for this hour, or the number of visitors from France — then Mint should just update that data., not rewrite everything it knows about from scratch. It could use a smaller database row dedicated to each aggregate value, for example. This change would reduce the Mint resource usage dramatically.

— Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies