Bogs down initial HTTP lookup on Flywheel hosting (Nginx)

If you are on high traffic site, it is not advisable to use WP-PostViews because every page refresh is +1 views to the DB.

I am not too sure whether it is related to HTTP lookup though

Even with no traffic there would be typically a 9 second wait after the initial request before anything else started to load. Testing with webwait.com and pingdom tools had the same result. I also tested with loadimpact, and the site quickly became unresponsive with only 10-20 concurrent users.

While doing all this I was also watching the view count tables, and they never increased due to these simulated visits — so that’s good.

What is the best method for tacking visits? I remember taking for granted that mambo/joomla did this flawlessly over 10 years ago. Would it make sense to store the view records in a file, perhaps temporarily, and then update the database on a daily schedule?

If you ask me, the best method is to use Google Analytics and take the views from there. But the API is very cumbersome for end users.

That is why for WP-PostViews, it is easy no frills view count, that just do a +1 update to a post custom field.

I don’t see why PostViews will bog down your http lookup actually because it will only increment the views if you visit the single post page and not the index page.