Ajax Timer postbacks and web server statistics

jjmonty — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:45:31 GMT

I inherited a page that uses the ajax timer to update some world clocks on a banner in a masterpage. It was very inefficient since it was updating every minute by posting back and reliving the page lifecycle...I resolved this with an asynchronous client-side call to a web service so that the entire page was not being run just to update these clocks every minute and viewstate load wasn't being shuttled back and forth. I reduced the load from 7k to about 40 bytes.

I learned how to do this with the client-side ajax library with this great article, fyi:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163499.aspx

Anyway, my question is about how web server statistics software on the server would have recorded the page in the inefficient setup using the ajax timer which posted back to the page and registered a 200 everytime per Fiddler. It seems the unique visitor and page view numbers would be vastly out-of-whack. Wouldn't this artificially inflate the page views of the page if it seems someone is refreashing it every minute? Does IIS somehow prevent these kinds of user distortions?

Now the page makes a call to a web service every minute which is an application call not a page. How will this be recorded in web statistics?

ASP.NET AJAX UI

Re: Ajax Timer postbacks and web server statistics

Ajax Timer postbacks and web server statistics