http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgHitcounterUpdateFreq is there to improve the performance by lowering the database load a bit but it has a major disadvantage: your view counts become wrong and lower than as without using $wgHitcounterUpdateFreq.
My thought is that it would be more useful for people to not count views on less important namespaces instead and only count e.g. MAIN. Sure the main ns takes most of the views but performance boost should be the same and in the end you don't ruin your view counters as with $wgHitcounterUpdateFreq.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement