Browscap doesn’t work

We are investigating the issue with some of our users.

Are you able to paste the user agent string from the Slimstat table corresponding to that entry?

I have the same issue.
If you give me the table name and column name i will do a select and paste the output here

if the table is wpprefix_slim_stats user agent is ‘Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36’

Quite strange. With that user agent, our test environment (with browscap activated) works just fine. What version of PHP are you running?

this is the output of php -v
PHP 5.6.24-0+deb8u1 (cli) (built: Jul 26 2016 08:17:07)
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.6-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies

Even tooltip is empty but record exist in db

Right, that’s the behavior we’ve seen on other people’s site. We are trying to narrow down the cause.

I’ve been having this problem too, and SlimStat support have been testing direct on one of my sites. As it may help others, I have copied here their explanation for this particular instance, and my response below:

Explanation from Slimstat:

Hi Rob

thank you for all the info. I was able to spend some time testing a few things, and it turns out your server is not loading the entire data file for some reason. This breaks the code because some strings are not defined (while they should be) and that’s why you get the empty strings in the Activity Log (question mark icons). You may want to look at the error log or other php configuration files to see why this is happening. It is definitely not happening on our live server ( wp-slimstat.com ) so it must be something in your server configuration.

Once that problem is solved, then everything should be back to normal. In the meanwhile the heuristic function (uninstall Browscap) is a valid alternative, given your server constraints.

Best Regards,
Your Slimstat Support Team.

My response:

Thanks for the explanation, and for diagnosing.

It is probably a constraint on use of resources on most shared server hosting, and given that, I think you’ll find that it will affect a lot of websites running your software.

If you can tell me the max size this file is I’ll see if I can change the setting – I think it is currently 8Mb.

Regardless of that, loading and checking an 8Mb file is pretty heavy on resources (and will affect speed too) so I for one will be avoiding use of browscap unless you can find a way of reducing its impact on site performance (main reason I started using slimstat instead of jetpack’s stats).

Best,

Rob

Thank you for sharing this bit of information with all our other users. I’m not sure I agree on the “lots of websites” affected, as we have not registered a lot of requests regarding this specific issue. Maybe 10-15 out of 120 THOUSAND users. So it looks like an issue specifically happening on your server.

As for the trade-off between performance and accuracy, our heuristic method is pretty accurate on about 80% of the most popular user strings available out there. So if that threshold is good enough for you, I would encourage those concerned about performance to stick with it. If accuracy is crucial for you (and it is for many users of our plugin), then Browscap is the way to go.

Jason.

Seem something related to php 5.6

I have a testing enviroment on this:
$ php -v
PHP 7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 (cli) ( NTS )
And tooltip show correctly user agent name and icon.

I also have a production vps and another testing environment on php 5.6 and the issue is present.

Another two site on an hostgator with php5.4.45 does not have the issue.

Not tested with php 5.5.X

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by silenx.

Thanks, silenx, that’s interesting – I am using php5.6 so might try using php7 if it doesn’t break other plugins I’m using (don’t want to use earlier versions for security reasons).

As mentioned above, it would also be useful to know current size of browscap data files so I can adjust max file size to suit on server (and memory available?).

However, given performance hit I’m likely to stay with heuristic method as it is accurate enough for myself, and clients

Just tested my site (same as Slimstat support were testing) with php version switched from 5.6 to 7 and as you indicated, silenx, it then works fine (no increase in memory/file size etc over config for 5.6, just version change)

Perhaps SlimStat support can now test and investigate further under php5.6 to eliminate what seems to be a bug in Slimstat when running using browscap db on that version.

I’ve copied php error log from my site when running browscap under php5.6 into my ticket with support.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by robf.

using php 5.6 and Browscap doesn’t work…

It’s only a tooltip problem: if you try to filter result with “Advacend Filter – browser type is equal to mozilla ” result is showing up. Issue only on php5.6 environment, that is very strange

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by silenx.