Support: Troubleshooting
Below you will find solutions to some common FlashStats problems.
FlashStats won't run
Make sure your system is configured to execute the FlashStats file instead of simply downloading it to the user as type application/octet-stream. Each server has its own way of specifying this configuration; please see Chapter 2: Installation of the FlashStats documentation for your platform for information on how to configure your web server properly.
If you are running FlashStats on Luckman Web Commander, you may need to create another server on another port in order to do this (e.g., www.yourdomain.com:8080).
How can I tell if my web server is set up correctly to run FlashStats?
Symptom: FlashStats doesn't seem to be working and you would like to check whether your web server recognizes FlashStats as a CGI program.
Solution: There is a simple way to run FlashStats directly without using a form to check that FlashStats is installed and will run. You can call FlashStats directly with a query string of "?about". For example, if your web server name is "yourserver.com" and FlashStats is installed in the "cgi" directory, you can call FlashStats with the about parameter with a URL like:
http://yourservername.com/cgi/flashstats.exe?about
FlashStats will return version information if it is correctly installed. In the Unix and Mac versions of FlashStats, the binary executable has a slightly different name, but the method works the same.
Accessing FlashStats in this way will not verify that the FlashStats configuration file is error free. It just shows that the web server can run FlashStats.
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FlashStats returns an error code
Symptom: FlashStats returns an error code with some explanation.These errors are returned by FlashStats v1.21. Previous versions returned less detailed errors or errors without a number attached.
Solution: Go check out our list of
FlashStats Errors for a detailed explanation of the errors and solutions.
My web browser reports "Document contains no data" for large log files
Symptom: You try to run FlashStats on a lot of log files and after a long time your browser reports "Document contains no data."
But you can successfully run FlashStats on either fewer days or just a subset of the directory structure and the results eventually
do show up in your browser.
Problem: The web server running the FlashStats cgi process is timing out before FlashStats has finished.
Solution: There are several possible solutions to this problem:
- Increase your web server's Timeout parameter so that the FlashStats cgi process has longer to run without
being shut down
- Don't generate the User Domain Analysis report, since it generates the most data in the server and takes
the most resources to run
- Analyze only a few days of log files at a time
- Analyze only a subdirectory of pages at a time (use the Page to Analyze field when configuring a report)
- Move the FlashStats executable to a faster machine if you have one available. You can either transfer the log
files to the faster machine, or access them over the network if you mount or map the log file directory so that it's
accessable by the machine running FlashStats.
You can verify this problem by running just the Hits Per Hour report and seeing if it can be generated quickly enough.
You may want to run it two or three times, since on subsequent runs the I/O time required to read the log files may
be lower due to caching on your server.
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FlashStats won't return anything or runs very slowly.
Symptom: FlashStats runs much more slowly than it used to (for the same size log files and reports) or never returns with a report. But
it was working fine at one time.
Problem: This only affects the unix versions of FlashStats version 1.2.
This version was inadvertantly compiled with a call to nice(20).
This puts FlashStats at the lowest priority. If another process
runs out of control or your system is under a heavy load, FlashStats
may take a long time to complete a report or may never return.
Solution: Upgrade to FlashStats v1.3 (it's Free).
This bug was introduced in version 1.2 and is fixed in version 1.3
Version 1.3 also adds priority controls to FlashStats so that
you can set the priority that you want FlashStats to run for
(Windows and Unix versions).
FlashStats just returns a lot of weird junk and random stuff.
Symptom: Instead of generating a proper report, FlashStats generates weird stuff instead. You may see tables and graphics interspersed with lots of other text, most of which doesn't make any sense.
Problem: You may have FlashStats configured to merely return the FlashStats binary raw to the user, rather than executing it and returning its output.
Solution: Change your web server configuration so that FlashStats gets executed instead of being returned as a document. Most web servers base this decision upon the executable filename's extension.
Here are instruction on how to fix this problem if you are running FlashStats.acgi on WebSTAR or Quid Pro Quo.
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Did this document solve your FlashStats problem?
If your questions were not answered by this troubleshooting document please
contact Maximized Software's Technical Support.
