Problem with OpenX not tracking Statistics
I was contacted this morning by a large Radio Network website that my company took over right around a year ago. This site originally involved us moving their existing site to our servers, and upgrading OpenX ads to the newest version. Well, at the time, OpenX appeared to have upgraded without a hitch (It didn't bark about anything) - So I thought we were good to go.
But if you find yourself in the boat I was in - You're a year down the road and your client wants Ad Statistics for the last year. Now you go to your statistics tab in OpenX and see nothing. Pretty scary - In fact, I distincly remember peeing a little.
Unfortunately, googling my way around the turned little results - So I started to do a little bit of digging within OpenX. I turned off automatic maintenance (because I didn't even know what it was). Looking on OpenX's docs, I noticed there is a more "reliable" form which runs from the command line. So I gave it a try, out of curiosity, and did a `tail -f` on the debug log. This where I finally got my my "AH-HAH!" moment... this script is going through all the raw statistical data, analyzing it, and saving it into it's normalized tables (used in the Statistics Table).
What had happened is all this raw data had been back logged, causing PHP to exceed the max_execution_time in the maintenance script. So in my case, openx was never making it passed the analyzing of the data - therefor leaving me with a blank statistics page.
I'm no OpenX expert, but I do hope this saves others the 8 hour headache I just endured.