View tally reset, cause and future solutions

2008-03-18T12:32:00-05:00

Hi all,

Last night one of our web servers suffered a hardware failure and had to be removed from the group of public-facing machines. Because of the way listing view tally data is currently stored, part of the listing tally data has been lost. This means that some ( roughly 1/10 of all ) listings have had their view tally data reset to 0.

The view tally data on Etsy is stored in a different and more temporary manner than any of the other data on the site. This is because view tally data is very difficult to store quickly ( it is updated thousands of times every second ) and because it is considered to be nonessential when compared to things like sales records, conversations, listings, user profiles, billing information, etc.

"Nonessential" doesn't mean "not important", however -- we know very well how sellers feel about their view tally information and we want to make this information as reliable as possible. We plan to begin developing a system that will store view tally data permanently and reliably, and we'd like to be able to tie it into tracking other information that sellers have been asking for, such as referrer information. This may take a little while, as much of the focus of the team is currently placed on scaling the site to handle the ever-growing traffic we've been experiencing.

We apologize for the frustrations caused by the existing view tally system. We know that it's very hard to run a shop online without reliable statistics. We’re anxious to provide you with better and more reliable statistics, and we’ll be getting them to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience!

Please address all comments and questions to the associated forum thread.

View Counts, Site Stability and Breaking News

2007-09-05T17:03:00-05:00

There's been lots of discussion regarding view counts and bugs in the forums as of late. Etsy's RevolvingDork has given the community his update on the situation, and will continue to do so as it develops.

Excerpted from RevolvingDork's August 27th forum post:

"Last week we were upgrading some of our servers, which in this case involved restarting them. The view counts you see on the live site are stored in the RAM of the servers themselves, and when a machine is restarted the RAM is cleared and the counts you see are wiped back to older values. All of the view data for your listings is still saved in a hard file, but they are not currently visible on the public website.

We're currently trying to overhaul the view system to make it more robust and prevent this sort of thing from happening, but it may take a few months to be implemented. In the meantime, your view counts may not be accurate. We believe we've gotten them to a state where they are incrementing properly, but they are not yet reliable.

This week we'll be monitoring them and thinking about ways to get them back in shape. If they get worse or continue to confuse folks, we may consider removing the counts from the site until they are reliable.

We know that many of you rely on your view counts, and we're trying to get a working system in place to store them as quickly as possible."

To discuss this further, please refer to the forum thread.

We are disabling comments on this post because RevolvingDork would prefer to discuss and diagnose problems with the community in one consolidated forum thread. We just wanted to bring it to your attention!

Also, we'd like to take this opportunity to let Etsy users know that all breaking news on view counts, site stability and hiccups in service will be consistently, honestly and quickly reported here in The Storque — straight from the horse's mouth! Please feel free to fire up your RSS to our TechUpdates so that you can instantly be alerted to new content as it is added. We are not, however, replacing the forums, which continue to be the best way to get the whole picture on such issues and participate in the community.

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View tally reset, cause and future solutions

View Counts, Site Stability and Breaking News