Visitor count correct or not?

[Davyc]

Here's a strange one that I just noticed today.  My visitor count most online for Wednesday (21st November) is 1,140 according to the block (see below):

Yet according to the ACP stats it's not (see below)

I cannot image so many people visiting especially as I've not pushed the site out there in any way as it's still a WIP.

No signs of spammers or new registrations, nothing in the moderators panel.

Puzzling??  Anyone else experienced this?

[Daniel F]

Because of performance reasons the widget is only updated on pages where the stats widget is present or when somebody views the online users page.

[Davyc]

4 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

Because of performance reasons the widget is only updated on pages where the stats widget is present or when somebody views the online users page.

I'm not sure what you mean by this - can you expand on it please?

For example, does the widget only work on pages that it appears on? If it does, and the ACP stats show different is there a reason for this?  It's all pretty unclear to me as I would have thought that the ACP stats would reflect what the widget is showing in order to maintain accuracy.

With thanks

[bfarber]

The way the widget works and the way the ACP stats page works are completely different. For the ACP, essentially every X minutes we take a snapshot of the number of guests and the number of members online, and store it. Then the graph shows you these values, but you'll note it's not just a single day being shown (it rolls up and down throughout the day).

The widget, on pages it loads on, takes a snapshot of the number of sessions and stores a raw count.

One huge discrepancy would be bot counts, possibly.