Thanks for suggestion! Unfortunately we cannot know the total number of visits in the visitor log and this is why we didn't display it there. we can't fetch this number because of performance reasons.

thanks for getting back!

I think "power-demanding" should be not a reason to not think about things any further.
(not only relevant for this relatively small issue)

Some reasons why "performance reasons" it's not always a "killer" and how one can deal with it:

1. piwik is very often used on pages with very low traffic
2. one did not need all information on load of a page so one can display it when it's ready
3. performance of server hardware is growing very fast (Multicore CPU, tons of RAM, SSD, PCIe-NVME SSDs...)
4. sometimes one do not need the very exact number:

• so one can "Stop counting" after a special amount of time and show something like "1000+"
• one can reuse numbers
• one can preindex values (on times when there is low server load)

5. data could often be (re-)used on several places
6. one can implement a switch in settings to activate all things which are great but power consuming
7. one can cut the worst case: do not show if segment is "all visits"
8. ...

I'm no developer, but probably there are several more ideas to work with power demanding tasks in general...

btw: is there already a tiny "best practise guide" for developer how to deal with performance demanding tasks within piwik/plugins?

of course not a solution but a demonstration, that others are doing the counting magic with perfect performance too.
Yes of course it looks unfair because google has other "resources", but they also have other amounts of data to deal with ;-)

I would vote for reopen this issue and give it a new label "performance demanding"
=> with this the idea is not gone, and one know one has to take activities to reduce the impact on performance.

@mattab: What do you think?

just noticed, of course this issue is based on the same data needed for #9109

Would be nice indeed to have this for a good usability :)

1. piwik is very often used on pages with very low traffic

Define "very often" and where did you get stats about this? ;)

Seriously, I got 1.7 million pageviews this November so far. We need real-life testing and safeguards so features don't kill the server. OTOH I'm always craving for new features...