Question

I want to count the number of visits (or visitors, not page requests or hits) made to my whole site.

I want to store each visit in a database to show some graphics with this data in the future.

Also, I want it to be reliable, fast and not to be polling to database for each page request. So, I think I should put some code in some entry point, but I don’t know where, and not in the Global.asax event AppEndRequest. I’m guessing to code the SessionStart or SessionEnd events.

How can I make this visit counter?

Answer 1

Note that Syed’s suggestion will track the number of visitors, while Jhonny’s will track the page hits. You might want to decide which one you’re after.

Assuming you want visitors, I agree with Syed, catch Session_Start in global and increment a number in the database.

You could get more useful information if you store extra info in the database – for example a table like this:

tblVisitor - SessionID nvarchar(32) - SessionStart datetime 

This would probably be better than just incrementing a counter, because you can check the number of visitors last month or this year, etc. and also get information about time-of-day usage.

However you did ask for the simplest possible way, and a simple counter would accomplish that for sure.