AskApache » Search Results » urchin.js

Speed Up Google Analytics, use local ga.js

AskApache — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:35:11 +0000

Last year I wrote about hosting Google Analytics urchin.js file on your own server, to speed up the loading of your site. Well, google has migrated to a new analytics javascript, ga.js. You can read the urchin.js to ga.js migration guide if you want. They also wrote about the changes on the Google Analytics Blog. And if you want to learn about advanced features of ga.js check out this Google Analytics Documentation.

XHTML for hosting ga.js locally

If you use a relative link like below, you don't need the https detection part of the script.

Also note that the -151 is from my advanced mod_rewrite Fix for Caching Updated Files. So you won't need that unless you implement that technique.

Shell Script to Update ga.js

Here is an updated shell script that fetches the latest ga.js file from google and places it in the folder of your site.

#!/bin/sh
 
# TMP DIRECTORY
MYTMP=/tmp/
 
# SAVE ga.js HERE
INSTALL_IN=/home/user/askapache.com/z/j/
 
# RESOURCE URLS
GOOGLE_GA_URL=http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
 
# USER-AGENT
UA="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3"
 
# CD TO TMP DIRECTORY
cd $MYTMP
 
# DOWNLOAD THE FILE
curl --header "Pragma:" -f -s -A "${UA}" -m 1800 --retry 15 --retry-delay 15 --max-redirs 8 -O $GOOGLE_GA_URL
 
# GIVE FILE CORRECT PERMISSIONS
chmod 644 $MYTMP/ga.js
 
# COPY FILE TO SITE DIRECTORY
cp -r $MYTMP/ga.js $INSTALL_IN
 
# RETURN TO OLDPWD
cd $OLDPWD
 
exit 0;

Updating ga.js with Crontab

Just add this to your crontab by typing crontab -e where google-analytics-update.sh is the location of your shell script.

@daily /home/user/scripts/google-analytics-update.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

More Speed Tips

Speed Up Google Analytics, use local ga.js originally appeared on AskApache.com

Speed Up Google Analytics with urchin.js

AskApache — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:10:16 +0000

AskApache.com

Update: This article is a bit dated, to get the newest and latest Google Analytics Speed Tips, check out the 3 part update about Hosting, Cookie Domains, and JavaScript Loading and Failproofs

Ever notice that sometimes your sites take a while to load all the way because google's urchin.js file is taking forever? You may recognize this problem when you see something similar to this in your browsers status bar "Transferring data from google-analytics.com..."

Time To Setup?

4 minutes I got tired of seeing that all the time and so I set up an automated cronjob that runs every 12 hours and downloads the latest version from google, and saves it to my website directory, then I reference /urchin.js instead of http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js.. and my site loads a lot faster! Take a look at the source for this page if you want to see what is going on (look at the bottom)

There are 2 pretty major things that you accomplish by hosting urchin.js locally

You Enable persistant connections
You ensure that the correct 304 Not Modified header is sent back to your site visitors instead of reserving the entire file.

The urch.sh shell script

Create a shell script called urch.sh.. this will be executed every 1/day or 1/wk, whatever you want. The following script removes the local urchin.js, then it wgets the latests version into the local directory.

#!/bin/sh
rm /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/urchin.js
cd /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/
wget http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
chmod 644 /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/urchin.js
cd ${OLDPWD}
exit 0;

Improved shell script

I realized right away that a more modular shell script would be needed.. I admin like 50+ web-sites and it would be stupid to have to type the same block of code 50 times, wget the same file 50 times, etc.. So this version downloads the urchin.js file into a temporary directory, then it copies it OVER the old file for each directory. So 1 GET request for unlimited sites.. The below is just for 2 sites.

#!/bin/sh
 
# SETTINGS
export TMP=${HOME}/sites/tmp/
export SH=${HOME}/sites/
export SJ=/public_html/z/j/
export UA="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3"
 
# SITES
export S1=htaccesselite.com
export S2=askapache.com
 
# RESOURCE URLS
L1=http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
 
# SETS CORRECT PERMS AND COPIES TO EACH SITES DOC_ROOT
setit(){
chmod 644 *.js
cp *.js $SH$1$SJ
}
 
cd $TMP
 
curl --header "Pragma:" -A "${UA}" --retry 200 --retry-delay 15 -O ${L1}
 
setit $S1
setit $S2
 
cd ${OLDPWD}
 
exit 0;

The crontab

Add this to your crontab by typing crontab -e

11 12 * * * /home/user/websites/urch.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Or to just check once a week do

0 2 * * 6 /home/user/websites/urch.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Finished! Read on for more in-depth overkill. In the past year urchin.js has only been updated once, yet the Last-Modified header reflects an updated date every request.. not even in a linear fashion I might add! The problem happens when requests for the urchin.js file on google-analytics.com spike, even with load-balancing technologies which are obviously in place. When this happens your browser makes the request for the urchin.js file, but instead of an immediate connection and transfer of the file you get a lagging transfer. One reason is because the server that the urchin.js file is served from does not allow persistant connections.

This object will be fresh for 1 week. It has a validator present, but when a conditional request was made with it, the same object was sent anyway. It doesn't have a Content-Length header present, so it can't be used in a HTTP/1.0 persistent connection.

Another big big reason is that even though Cache-Control headers are correctly set by google-analytics when serving urchin.js, Instead of responding to an If-Modified-Since header correctly with a 304 Not Modified header, indicating the file has not been modified, google-analytics instead returns the entire urchin.js file again, thus rendering the cache-control void. You can see this problem with a wireshark capture from an exchange.

GET /urchin.js HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Referer: http://www.askapache.com
Accept-Language: en-us
UA-CPU: x86
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
If-Modified-Since: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:49:11 GMT
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SU 2.011; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Alexa Toolbar; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)
Host: www.google-analytics.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=604800, public
Content-Type: text/javascript
Last-Modified: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:54:02 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Server: ucfe
Content-Length: 5675
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:23:12 GMT

Of course you should implement your own caching scheme for best results.

So there are 2 pretty major things that you can eliminate by using a locally hosted version of the urchin.js file.

Enable persistant connections
Send correct 304 Not Modified headers

Still, this issue only becomes an issue if you notice lags from the google-analytics site, which happen from time to time.

Other Speed Tips

To truly speed up your site, you will want to implement a server-side caching technique. Or you can read more about caching and web cache.

Apache Caching Guide

This document supplements the mod_cache, mod_disk_cache, mod_mem_cache, mod_file_cache and htcacheclean reference documentation.

It describes how to use Apache's caching features to accelerate web and proxy serving, while avoiding common problems and misconfigurations.

Speed Up Google Analytics with urchin.js originally appeared on AskApache.com

Advanced Google Analytics 404 Error Page

AskApache — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:16:54 +0000

AskApache.com

Advanced 404 Not Found Error page usage with Google Analytics. This makes it very easy to diagnose and keep track of 404 Error messages from within google analytics. Enjoy!

NOTE:You will most definately want to check out and use the Google 404 Error Page.

Normal Google Analytics code on 404 error page

This default setup for 404 error pages makes it very difficult to find and analyze 404 error page usage stats in Google Analytics

Advanced 404 Error Page Setup for Google Analytics urchin

Since the urchinTracker function has 1 argument which is called "page", this code tells it that the "page" should be /404/?page-not-found=page-requested&linked-from=referrer.

My WordPress 404.php page

Note also how I have used the googlebot and robots meta tags to tell robots not to index or follow links in this page

404 Error - Page Not Found

Ooops! - The requested page could not be found.

Google Analytics urchin.js

//-- Google Analytics Urchin Module
//-- Copyright 2005 Google, All Rights Reserved.
 
//-- Urchin On Demand Settings ONLY
var _uacct="";      // set up the Urchin Account
var _userv=1;      // service mode (0=local,1=remote,2=both)
 
//-- UTM User Settings
var _ufsc=1;      // set client info flag (1=on|0=off)
var _udn="auto";    // (auto|none|domain) set the domain name for cookies
var _uhash="on";    // (on|off) unique domain hash for cookies
var _utimeout="1800";     // set the inactive session timeout in seconds
var _ugifpath="/__utm.gif";  // set the web path to the __utm.gif file
var _utsp="|";      // transaction field separator
var _uflash=1;      // set flash version detect option (1=on|0=off)
var _utitle=1;      // set the document title detect option (1=on|0=off)
var _ulink=0;      // enable linker functionality (1=on|0=off)
var _uanchor=0;      // enable use of anchors for campaign (1=on|0=off)
var _utcp="/";      // the cookie path for tracking
var _usample=100;    // The sampling % of visitors to track (1-100).
 
//-- UTM Campaign Tracking Settings
var _uctm=1;      // set campaign tracking module (1=on|0=off)
var _ucto="15768000";    // set timeout in seconds (6 month default)
var _uccn="utm_campaign";  // name
var _ucmd="utm_medium";    // medium (cpc|cpm|link|email|organic)
var _ucsr="utm_source";    // source
var _uctr="utm_term";    // term/keyword
var _ucct="utm_content";  // content
var _ucid="utm_id";    // id number
var _ucno="utm_nooverride";  // don't override
 
//-- Auto/Organic Sources and Keywords
var _uOsr=new Array();
var _uOkw=new Array();
_uOsr[0]="google";  _uOkw[0]="q";
_uOsr[1]="yahoo";  _uOkw[1]="p";
_uOsr[2]="msn";    _uOkw[2]="q";
_uOsr[3]="aol";    _uOkw[3]="query";
_uOsr[4]="aol";    _uOkw[4]="encquery";
_uOsr[5]="lycos";  _uOkw[5]="query";
_uOsr[6]="ask";    _uOkw[6]="q";
_uOsr[7]="altavista";  _uOkw[7]="q";
_uOsr[8]="search";  _uOkw[8]="q";
_uOsr[9]="netscape";  _uOkw[9]="s";
_uOsr[10]="cnn";  _uOkw[10]="query";
_uOsr[11]="looksmart";  _uOkw[11]="qt";
_uOsr[12]="about";  _uOkw[12]="terms";
_uOsr[13]="mamma";  _uOkw[13]="query";
_uOsr[14]="alltheweb";  _uOkw[14]="q";
_uOsr[15]="gigablast";  _uOkw[15]="q";
_uOsr[16]="voila";  _uOkw[16]="kw";
_uOsr[17]="virgilio";  _uOkw[17]="qs";
_uOsr[18]="live";  _uOkw[18]="q";
_uOsr[19]="baidu";  _uOkw[19]="wd";
_uOsr[20]="alice";  _uOkw[20]="qs";
_uOsr[21]="seznam";  _uOkw[21]="w";
_uOsr[22]="yandex";  _uOkw[22]="text";
_uOsr[23]="najdi";  _uOkw[23]="q";
 
//-- Auto/Organic Keywords to Ignore
var _uOno=new Array();
//_uOno[0]="urchin";
//_uOno[1]="urchin.com";
//_uOno[2]="www.urchin.com";
 
//-- Referral domains to Ignore
var _uRno=new Array();
//_uRno[0]=".urchin.com";

Google Analytics urchin.js

Urchin On Demand Settings ONLY
_uacct  =""       set up the Urchin Account
_userv  =1       service mode (0 =local,1 =remote,2 =both)
 
UTM User Settings
_ufsc  =1       set client info flag (1 =on|0 =off)
_udn ="auto"     (auto|none|domain) set the domain name for cookies
_uhash ="on"     (on|off) unique domain hash for cookies
_utimeout ="1800"      set the inactive session timeout in seconds
_ugifpath ="/__utm.gif"   set the web path to the __utm.gif file
_utsp ="|"       transaction field separator
_uflash =1       set flash version detect option (1 =on|0 =off)
_utitle =1       set the document title detect option (1 =on|0 =off)
_ulink =0       enable linker functionality (1 =on|0 =off)
_uanchor =0       enable use of anchors for campaign (1 =on|0 =off)
_utcp ="/"       the cookie path for tracking
_usample =100     The sampling % of visitors to track (1-100).
 
UTM Campaign Tracking Settings
_uctm =1       set campaign tracking module (1 =on|0 =off)
_ucto ="15768000"     set timeout in seconds (6 month default)
_uccn ="utm_campaign"   name
_ucmd ="utm_medium"     medium (cpc|cpm|link|email|organic)
_ucsr ="utm_source"     source
_uctr ="utm_term"     term/keyword
_ucct ="utm_content"   content
_ucid ="utm_id"     id number
_ucno ="utm_nooverride"   don't override

Advanced Google Analytics 404 Error Page originally appeared on AskApache.com

Use php.ini to replace html with anything

AskApache — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:19:10 +0000

AskApache.com

What to include?

By including a php file using php.ini, you can replace the headers in your html with dynamic headers.

Include a php file that contains a function to replace html with different html. You include a file from your php.ini like auto_prepend_file /home/askapache.com/config.php?

config.php example from: Effective way to update your blog's header scripts




';
 
$quantcast = '



';
 
$mybloglog = '

';
 
$pages  = array(); // Add pages (relative to the public site root) that should be ignored
$ip    = array(); // Add IP addresses that should be ignored, for instance you don't want to track yourself or your company's visit to your blog.
 
if (
  strpos($page,'frameset') !== false ||
  (!empty($ip) && in_array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $ip)) ||
  (!empty($pages) && in_array((isset($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) && !empty($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']))?$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']:$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], $pages))
  )
{ return $page; }
$replace = array
  (
    '',
    ''
  );
  return str_replace($replace, "\n{$googleAnalytics}\n\n{$quantcast}\n\n{$mybloglog}\r", $page);
}
ob_start("Config");
?>

php.ini

auto_prepend_file

Specifies the name of a file that is automatically parsed before the main file. The file is included as if it was called with the include() function, so include_path is used. The special value none disables auto-prepending.

auto_append_file

Specifies the name of a file that is automatically parsed after the main file. The file is included as if it was called with the include() function, so include_path is used. The special value none disables auto-appending.

Note: If the script is terminated with exit(), auto-append will not occur.

Use php.ini to replace html with anything originally appeared on AskApache.com