One type of component available for Joomla is a 'stats' component which allows users to gain statistical data about their site visitors directly through Joomla. A fair number of Joomla users would think "fantastic" and go ahead and install it. I mean being able to get all that statistical data about your visitors directly through Joomla sounds great.
However, what a lot of people don't seem to understand is that most of these stats components increase the load on the MySQL server by a dramatic amount above and beyond the core Joomla install. In some cases we have seen these stats components bring down entire managed servers hosting large Joomla sites. I should point out that while this particular issue is most noticeable on larger sites it affects all Joomla-powered sites - large or small. I should also point out that while this particular problem could apply to any Joomla component we have seen it most noticeable with the stats components.
I want to stress that this is not a problem with the Joomla core itself which we believe to be very stable. The problem is with the stats components that are being released through the official Extensions and other websites as add-ons for Joomla. In my opinion statistical data about site visitors should continue to be gathered and processed at the server level and not through a platform such as Joomla which adds excessive server loads to core services such as MySQL every time a visitor hits your website. This added load not only hits server performance but it also impacts the speed of your website.
We receive sales emails from people at least a couple of times per week who are looking to move their hosting because their current host tells them their Joomla installation is killing the server. It isn't in fact the Joomla installation that's at fault most of the time - it is a stats component which is installed under Joomla. It is often hard for a hosting provider who is not familiar with Joomla to tell that the component is to blame and not Joomla itself. This isn't their fault at all and it doesn't mean they are a bad host, it just means they aren't experts with Joomla.
My advice to anyone using Joomla would be to steer well clear of these 'stats' components to avoid running into problems with your web hosting provider's abuse / policy enforcement team. I would also advise anyone already running any of these stats components to drop them from your Joomla installation. You may not have encountered a problem yet because your site doesn't receive enough concurrent traffic at the moment but I can guarantee it will become a bigger issue as your site grows. I would also like to kindly ask that the developers of these components take this issue to heart before releasing any further components like this on unsuspecting victims.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post and I hope it may have proved useful to a few of you
