Manual:Hitcounter table

The hitcounter table in MediaWiki is a temporary buffer for storage of page view information. Depending on the value of the $wgHitcounterUpdateFreq setting, the table stores the page_id value of any pages that were visited in its hc_id field. The number in the setting is then fed into a randomizer, which then updates the page_counter fields of the stored pages when the random number is equal to a particular value.

This table was introduced in MediaWiki 1.3, and will always be empty if $wgDisableCounters is set to true.

Hc_id
Contains the page_id of each visited page in the buffer.

Schema summary
DESCRIBE hitcounter in MediaWiki 1.9 and earlier gives the following: mysql> describe mw_hitcounter; +---+--+--+-+-+---+ +---+--+--+-+-+---+ +---+--+--+-+-+---+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
 * Field | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
 * hc_id | int(10) unsigned | NO  |     | NULL    |       |