Question

I need to show some basic stats on the front page of our site like the number of blogs, members, and some counts – all of which are basic queries.

Id prefer to find a method to run these queries say every 30 mins and store the output but im not sure of the best approach and I don’t really want to use a cron. Basically, I don’t want to make thousands of queries per day just to display these results.

Any ideas on the best method for this type of function?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Unfortunately, cron is better and reliable solution.

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name cron comes from the word "chronos", Greek for "time". Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email.

If you are to store the output into disk file,
you can always check the filemtime is lesser than 30 minutes,
before proceed to re-run the expensive queries.