Manual:Hitcounter table

The hitcounter table in MediaWiki is a temporary buffer for storage of page view information.

If   is set to a value bigger than 1, this table stores the  value of every page that was visited.

The value of $wgHitcounterUpdateFreq is then fed into a randomizer, which then updates the  fields of the stored pages when the random number is equal to a particular value.

This reduces database load; updating the page_counter field with every page hit is a main source for slow queries.

After this batch update of the page_counter fields has been done, the hitcounter table is emptied.

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

Additionally, if   is set to 1, the page table is directly updated, and this table is not used.

This table has been removed from the MediaWiki Core to an extension in MediaWiki 1.25 since the page counter feature itself has been removed from Core.

See Requests for comment/Removing hit counters from MediaWiki core.

This functionality was then provided by the  extension.

If the extension has been in use, data in this table has been moved to another place and the hitcounter table (if still present) has been removed in MediaWiki 1.26.

hc_id
Contains the <tvar|page-id></> of each visited page in the buffer.

Schema summary
+---+--+--+-+-+---+ +---+--+--+-+-+---+ +---+--+--+-+-+---+
 * Field | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
 * hc_id | int(10) unsigned | NO  |     | NULL    |       |