I am writing a Activity tracker for a grails application.
Objective : To Log Usage Hours and browsed pages so that I can analyse logged in user’s activity pattern.
My current planned solution : Make two tables, One named ‘activity’, second ‘browsed_page’ Activity table will store user_id, jsessionid, date_created, validtill.
and browsed_page will have activity_id and browsed_url. The javascript on every pages will be executed for checking mouse activity every 5 minutes, if it detects mousemove, it will make a ajax request to the conroller and the controller logs accordingly.
Initially, validtill will be 5 minutes plus the date_created, which will be updated to be current_time + 5 minutes, if the activity is detected and ajax request is made.
My question : Is this system reliable performance wise? I mean, after every 5 minutes, or new page browsed, update is run on activity table to update validtill time. When the application grows and it starts having millions of records, will those updates hamper the performance? Can I get some suggestion what can I do to improve my system?
I would skip the part about mouse movements and just piggy back the usage statistics onto the normal actions the user does against your application. I guess that almost all interaction on the site generates a call to to the application.
Make sure that tracking is configurable so that you can turn it off if it hogs the system.
When it comes to tables I believe in doing it in just one table that you only ever write to. No updates, searches or deletes. That is the cheapest way of doing it.
Then you would do analysis “off line”, possibly on a statistics replica of the database.