Maintenance

What maintenance tasks are needed?

• Download Updates of GeoLiteCity.datfile once in a while (they change each month)
• Delete data from profiles if the stats become too slow / database too big (you can also automate this for all profiles)
• Check for Logaholic Updates (to stay current with features, browsers, crawlers etc)

Keeping the database size and speed under control
For each profile Logaholic stores information in serveral database tables. The main table (has the same name as your profile) contains the most data. Depending on many factors, like hardware and server load, your updating and reporting can become slow if there are too many records in the table. If this is the case for you, you can do a few things:

• Delete data from the profile

You can remove the bulky detailed data, but keep certain summary tables.

You will still be able to See Visitors Per Day and Visitors Per Month for the deleted date range.

1. Click the "Maintenance" link on the Manage Profiles tab
2. Next, click "Delete a specific Date Range from this profile"
3. Choose the date range you want to delete, keep at least the last 2 months though.
4. Select "Delete only detail data".
5. Click "Delete".

• Only track useful information

If you are using log files, a lot (if not most) data is simply not interesting, but it's still takking up space in your database. A good policy is to remove pages from the reports you don't care about. Especially pages that get requested ofen (perhaps an automatically refreshing page or script).

Also, some sites add unique visitor or session id strings to the url for each visitor. These kinds of parameters can take up a huge amount of space and are never used. So, you can safely delete them. Here's how:

1. Decide which pages and parameters you can skip by browsing the Top Pages and the Top Pages - Details report
2. Go to Manage Profiles >> Edit Profile >> Data Collection tab
3. Add entries for Skip IP's, Skip Pages and Strip URL Parameters
4. Click Save

This will remove your selections from the statistics for new traffic, if you want to remove items already in the Logaholic database, use the tool provided on the Data Collection tab.

• IP skip

It's a good idea to skip / blacklist your own IP if a site has less than 500 visits per day, otherwise your own use of the site can skew the data. Of course, this is much more obvious if the traffic is low, but in any case you should exclude your own IP.

This means that you tell Logaholic to ignore your own computer when calculating visit data. You can add your office and home IPs to the profile:
Edit Profile >> Manage Profiles tab >> Data Collection tab >> text box at foot, 'Skip IP Numbers'.

IPs entered here are ignored. Of course, on all DSL (broadband or cable) connections except SDSL business broadband, IPs are dynamic - and that means they change. Cable IPs are very stable and don't change unless you reboot your router, but phone line DSL is far less stable, and some ISPs even change your IP daily for various reasons. So one maintenance task will be to change the skipped IP list from time to time.