Mint Forum

To answer your questions:

1. Mint stores the total number of visits and uniques for a year and provides a total number since Mint installation. The individual hit stats which power the majority of the Mint panes are cleared around a month, but it could be shorter depending on how many visits your site receives. To get an idea, I’d look at the Mint demo.

2. Mint does all the tracking itself via Javascript. This is to prevent spammers/bots from showing up in your stats. You can safely disable any server logs and Mint will not be affected.

Mint really isn’t clearing the stats every month. It’s just dropping the individual hits that are older than a month. So your basically looking at the last 4 weeks of stats.

Mint has never really been about seeing large amounts of data. It’s about looking at the latest, freshest statistics on your site. There is no way to compare referrers or searches from month to month. Mint is more about seeing what referrer all the sudden started pulling in a number of hits (ex. track an incoming Digg), or the path a user takes through your site.

The technical explanation is the database would get too large and drastically slow down a site if all user data was retained.

In order to track pages, you will have to add the Javascript to all your pages. If you use a CMS, this can easily be accomplished by editing your theme or installing a plugin. If you manually create your pages, there is a way to automatically insert the tracking code via auto_prepend_file, but it’s a little more advanced.

Flash files are tricky to track. If it was a normal download like a ZIP, that’s no problem. There are several Peppers available which can do that. However, flash files won’t play in a browser window if anything is being used to track their access; it would instead force a download. If you’re really interested in tracking flash view and actually created the content yourself, there are ways to log Mint hits in flash, but is of course more advanced.

No, I know what you’re saying. Out of the box, Mint will not log that swf files access. The reason is what you stated, accessing swf files bypasses the Javascript used for tracking. Size doesn’t matter, etc.

awstats uses server logs to analyze site usage. Mint uses Javascript to track and therefore does not catch every little thing on your website (its goal is to eliminate useless junk, but in this case it matters to you).

There was a Pepper out there for Mint 1 which may work in Mint 2. The Pepper analyzed downloads via server logs. That may work for you for tracking swfs, but I doubt it since an embed usually does not count as a download. There was also a flash tracking Pepper for Mint 1, but the reports seem to indicate it does not work in Mint 2.

If your sole goal is to eliminate CPU usage on a high performance site, Mint isn’t going to solve that. I’d wait for Shaun (Mint author) to back me up on this, but writing apache logs would take significantly less processing power compared to the php processing and database connections needed to process a Mint hit. However, keep in mind that with proper configuration, you could run Mint from a separate server.

So yeah, it doesn’t seem like Mint will do exactly what you’re looking for. Really the only thing which will do what you’re looking for is apache logs and some program such as awstats that analyzes the logs. Any other service such as Google Analytics would miss the flash tracking as well.