Advanced ClickBank Calculators

We've been busy at CB Dealer. Check out the new calculators.

The Affiliate calculator shows your net on any sale.

The Vendor calculator is really cool. Just put in two parameters and it will show complete information for the sale. Use it to set commissions and prices, or determine exactly how much to charge to get a specific net for yourself and your affiliates.

The calculators are at http://www.cbdealer.com/clickbank_calculator.php

 

Not bad, not bad. I'm sure that will come in handy some day.

I'm checking out http://www.cbdealer.com/clickbank_stats_gainers.php and it seems to be very slow-loading. Is this because it builds a report each time it runs or because I'm not logged in?

Very interesting though, either way.

 

Thanks. The stats are built on-demand. The page load should be faster, though. This morning I'm looking at whether the indexes are being rebuilt properly on the daily update.

 

Why aren't you cronning that puppy for off-hours?

That way when it displays, it's fast! Also, that way you only crunch the data once instead of each time.

 

There is a fairly massive chron job that runs every morning, and another chron job that deals with the weekly snapshots. The db is somewhat denormalized to speed up the pop rank and gravity stats pages. That denormalization is rebuilt as part of the weekly chron job. I may look at caching some of the data, which would result in a big performance boost. It's just a matter of finding time to write the code to do it.

 

Amen, brother.

Right now, my site http://www.blogflare.com runs on an hourly cron that updates all statistics. It's crazy the amount of time it takes as it gets into the millions of hits. It starts taking 10-15 minutes for a script to execute. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to cache these results. I built it and tested several different ways of running the calculations but for the versions the software is running on (MySQL 3.43 and PHP4), I can't really use stored procedures to do all the work yet.

Once I upgrade, I'll definitely look into that to speed things up. But my opinion in general is .. anything that can be automated, automate it! Less work for me.

I agree with you on the caching is the best way to go about displaying those results on your site, as it seems to be eating up a lot of time and resources each time it's compiled.

 

Upgrading to MySQL 4+ is definitely worthwhile. We did the upgrade a few weeks ago, and it was a fairly major hassle. We host and manage about 30 of our own sites and about 100 client sites. Planned intensely for the upgrade and still once we did it nobody slept for a couple of days until we got everything working on all the sites. The added functionality made it worth it, though. Next we'll be going to PHP5 (running 4.4.4 right now), going to MySQL5, and moving some sites to new servers at the same time. Getting my picture taken now while I still only have a little bit of gray hair.

 

Haha.. yeah. I would LOVE to get MySQL 5 running. In fact, I think I'm going to put that on my to-do list.

My partners and I run over 50 sites of our own, so it's a similar hassle but no customers depend on the data, so it's less of a risk. Part of my personal income relies on the sites, but I doubt they'll be down for long.

What sorts of problems are you running into, if you don't mind me asking?

 

Most of the problems we had were actually with one of the webservers. As far as the database, some date handling functionality has changed. Check mysql.com for specifics that may apply to you.