Notification

Urchin WebAnalytics Software is discontinued and is no longer supported. All Urchin documentation applies only to the Urchin product as it was at the time of discontinuation, and does not apply to any Google Analytics products or services.

Disabling Automatic Urchin Database Backups / Archives

Overview
By default, Urchin 4 automatically creates ZIP-formatted archives of the per-Profile monthly Urchin databases whenever log processing is initiated. This allows the Urchin databases to be rolled back to a known good state using the udb-sanitizer utility if Urchin processing is interrupted due to a system reboot, running out of disk space, or other failure; or in the case of database corruption.

While this functionality is essential to providing reliable Urchin reporting, the archiving process by its very nature is quite CPU intensive and may have a noticeable impact on the system running Urchin. This is typically only the case for very large sites where the per-Profile Urchin databases are hundreds of megabytes per month (or larger). Given that many enterprises already have alternative methods for recovering data, e.g. from backup tape or instant restore technologies, it may be advantageous to disable the Urchin database archiving process for operations that have this capability and are noticing a performance impact from the archiving process. As an additional benefit, there will also be some per-Profile disk space savings since Urchin will no longer maintain zip archives of the current month's data.

WARNING! Disabling the zip archiving of Urchin Profile data renders the rollback features of the udb-sanitizer utility completely inoperable. Do not do this unless you have some other reliable, external method for restoring the Urchin Profile data. Disabling of archiving cannot be done on a per-Profile basis! If you disable it, you disable it for all Profiles being processed by Urchin.

The archive disabling process cannot be performed from the web based Urchin administrative interface. In order to proceed, you will need to invoke an interactive command line shell from Windows or UNIX as the user that Urchin runs as. Once you have invoked the shell, perform the following actions (note that the uconf-driver command is all on one line):

Windows System

  • cd C:\Program Files\Urchin\util
  • uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=machine name="Process Settings" cr_backups=off
  • UNIX-type System

  • cd /usr/local/urchin4/util (assuming default Urchin installation directory)
  • ./uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=machine name="Process Settings" cr_backups=off
  • Upon successful invocation, the uconf-driver utility will print "2" upon exit. You can confirm that the parameter was set properly by invoking the uconf-export utility and ensuring that the cr_backups parameter is listed under the Process Settings table.

    Note: You can re-enable the archive process at any time by invoking the uconf-driver utility as above, substituting the string cr_backups=on for the cr_backups=off portion of the uconf-driver invocation.

    Search
    Clear search
    Close search
    Main menu
    10479481089255338638
    true
    Search Help Center
    true
    true
    true
    false
    false