Manual:$wgDisableCounters

Details
  determines whether or not to update the number of times a page has been viewed. If is set to false, each page will have a counter in its footer saying: "  "

This setting also determines whether  is available.

This variable is initialized in. The initial value is. To override the default value, add the line to the file .

The value of the counter is updated in in the function. (In a previous version, this was in the function  .) The variable is also referred to in other script files.

Alternatives
If performance problems due to high hit counts updating the table is a concern, a less dramatic alternative to disabling them may be to tweak.

You can also retrieve such statistics through your apache (or squid if using squid caching) request logs.

Disabled in 1.25.0. See Removing hit counters from MediaWiki core and other alternatives.