How to disable report viewed products in magento

Question

Our magento store is writing about 50 rows per second to the report_viewed_product_index table.

How can I disable this event?

I have log cleaning cron enabled but that doesn't prevent the unnecessary DB writes.

Are there any downside to disabling this?

Answer 1

The event is being fired from core. You can disable this event observer in a custom module (rather then editing core files, which is evil ;) ). Put this in your app/code/local/(VendorName)/(ModuleName)/etc/config.xml:

<config>
    <frontend>
        <events>
            <catalog_controller_product_view>
                <observers>
                    <reports>
                        <type>disabled</type>
                    </reports>
                </observers>
            </catalog_controller_product_view>
        </events>
    </frontend>
</config>

The magic happens in merging your config.xml with the one from core that is defining this observer. Your XML overrides the core <type> node and sets the type to "disabled" which results in the event observer still being there, but not being fired.

Is there any downside to this (disabling viewed products counting)?

I can't think of any downside in disabling this other than that you can't see product view reports anymore...

Also see the answer by Fra here explaining how to disable reports completely (if you don't need them at all) and other Magento code that puts a load on your database.

Answer 2

Don't forget: magento strongly recommended do not edit core files.

The module which create reports is Mage_Reports. On one hand you can disable module, but I can't tell you what dangerous can happen. On the other hand magento create reports in Mage_Reports_Model_Observer. You can remove from the config unnecessary reports. Here is path to the config:

app/code/core/Mage/Reports/etc/config.xml

The most probably the event which are you looking for is:

        <catalog_controller_product_view>
            <observers>
                <reports>
                    <class>reports/event_observer</class>
                    <method>catalogProductView</method>
                </reports>
            </observers>
        </catalog_controller_product_view>

You can remove it.

Answer 3

Product Page Report:

1. Report can be disabled in the backend see Mage::helper('reports')->isReportsEnabled();
2. or you can override Mage_Reports_Model_Event_Observer and add your logic to the method catalogProductView()

Visitor Log:
The above report is not the only one that write on DB, the visitor log is far more active ( 2 insert for every BOT access ).
So if your concern is to limit the MySql activity you should look into the below infos:

The following methods are called on every access:

• Mage_Log_Model_Visitor:initByRequest()
• Mage_Log_Model_Visitor:saveByRequest()

Apparently Magento developers were aware by the BOT risk:

As you can see there is a filter in the constructor that check the user agent:

 $ignoreAgents = $this->_config->getNode('global/ignore_user_agents');
        if ($ignoreAgents) {
            $ignoreAgents = $ignoreAgents->asArray();
            if (in_array($userAgent, $ignoreAgents)) {
                $this->_skipRequestLogging = true;
            }
        }

Anyway it filters only certain bot ...

 <global>
      ...
        <ignore_user_agents>
            <google1>Googlebot/1.0 ([email protected] http://googlebot.com/)</google1>
            <google2>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)</google2>
            <google3>Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)</google3>
        </ignore_user_agents>