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Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
In reality, the "views" tracking is indeed an item that is a "luxury" and was beginning to introduce some problems.
As most people who work with high-volume technology are aware, simple database writes can often take up to four times the processor cycles as read queries, even read queries that touch on more data than a simple one-column update write... such as incrementing the view counter for a thread.
I ran a test by removing the view increment for guests, and db server load immediately decreased... so now it's implemented across all sites and we're no longer tracking views. You may notice other very large boards have adopted a similar approach.
The issue of incrementing a view-tally on every page load is not an issue on small-traffic and/or small-size sites. But as our threads table continues to grow in size with more than 262,000 topics, it has become an increasingly processor-heavy operation to open the large table, read the current views, write the views+1, then close the large table each time a thread is viewed. Now consider that our threads are getting close to 200,000 views a day, and you start to see our problem.
So, now that we're not incrementing a view-counter, views are no longer shown.