I am a little confused as to the significance of the "hits" number upon which such things as the Visit Counter plugins and the "Most Popular" module are based.

When I compare these numbers, they do not correspond either in ranking or order of magnitude to what my provider shows in cPanel under AWStats.

For example, on the backend, I see a recent page having 86 hits, and appearing fourth in rank. But AWStats shows that it outranks other content pages that appear above it on the K2 ADMIN STATS, with numbers like this:

visits 1045 entry 679 exit 399

Without digging down and inspecting the code (for which I don't really have time right now, given that my maintenance of this website is a favor for a friend and I have a day job :-) ), could someone explain the origin of this discrepancy to me?

Thanks, Al Rossi

Hello,

If you are using caching then not all hits are registered. Some users are served cached content so these hits are not 100% accurate.

Do you mean any caching? or a particular caching setting?

Krikor, I don't understand why a plugin like "Most Popular" would use cached counts. It makes the concept useless.

When I look in the admin backend at a given article, the "hits" means what, exactly? I can't believe that, as administrator, I would see hits according to my browser cache.

Let me be a bit more specific about what is on my site.

System: Cache ON - Conservative, 1440 minutes

SpeedCache – enabled, but Browser Cache setting is off because it does not work well on my site.

.htaccess – has the JCH OPTIMIZE mod_expires settings, so this takes care of the browser caching.

If I disable the Joomla cache, there will be a performance penalty, no? Same goes for the .htaccess rules.

But I've turned off caching in the K2 module reporting the most popular items. That seems, however, not to be to helpful, as all that does is access the individual item hit counts.

Ignore this comment. You are obviously talking about the Joomla caching.

If Joomla! caches hits, there is little we can do.
Hits means how many times the item was requested.

I can't believe that, as administrator, I would see hits according to my browser cache.

Your browser's cache has nothing to do with this.