I believe it to be related to concurrent access of the file that holds the count. If you find the bug, please let me know. For now, it's staying as is, bugs and all. To teach myself PHP, and to add fun functionality to my pages, I wrote my own counter. I'll be extending its features as I go, but for now, I'll share with you the source code for this bare-bones hit counter.
Features Counts the number of times a page gets viewed, and displays it as text.
Features I'd like to implement Not counting reloads - or at least, not counting them withing 5 minutes of the initial load. Might use cookies for this. Graphical numbers Additional facilities for recording how often an individual visits the page. Finally, for each page that contains this counter, create a file to hold the hit count. For example, if your page is called foo.php , your hit count file is called foo.php.count .