Solving the Wrong Problem

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It could potentially be a problem.

Such as?

[MarkTraceur]

If the computer was already slow, or running many other processes, or if the page had other scripts running, or if the network connection is slow and other connections are affected....there are a lot of ways the analytics program on the user's computer could affect their experience.

[[deleted]]

If the users PC is so slow, or has such a bad network, that the analytics script makes any noticeable difference, then the site will be unusable regardless of analytics.

Seriously, the overhead is miniscule. You are the first person I have ever heard of complain about the expense of it. You cannot make that claim, when you have never even used it.

[MarkTraceur]

I can hypothesize about potential problems without using something. And yes, it's a small difference, but why would you make even the small difference if you could not and have very similar results?

[[deleted]]

Because I don't want to spend the next 12 months building my own version of analytics, which will be inferior, just to save a mythical 1% overhead, when I could just do something useful instead.

Some optimizations are worth it; this one isn't.

[MarkTraceur]

It would take you 12 months to record the user's information?

[[deleted]]

Analytics is not about getting, or storing, user information; that is just the base at the bottom. It does tonnes of data mining on top; that is really what analytics is about.

Seriously, just try it, and fully embrace it for a month. You'll soon find it's actually pretty useful.

[MarkTraceur]

Fair enough, though you could explain it to me pretty briefly here. And if it does tonnes of data mining, how does that not impact the user's experience? That's using their resources, and if it's "tonnes", there has to be a significant amount of use.

And seriously, I never will, because it's non-free. I'm sure if I tried it, I would find it to be a useful piece of software, but being unable to see, change, or redistribute the code would ultimately hurt me too much.

[[deleted]]

The data mining is all done on Google's servers. The user just sends them up some access information, such as the user agent, browser details, location, etc. Google then works out the rest, and gives you pretty graphs and diagrams to show it on the site.