Question

I’ve been asked to create a custom ‘tracker’ in PHP, to know where users are coming from and where they are going on the site.

I’m thinking of writing a simple script, which connects to a database, writes the ip, browser, and time of the visit, then closes the db link.

Is this the right way to do it ?

I’ve found a few similar questions on stackoverflow, but none mentioned performance.

Answer 1

I suppose it’s another question of the kind “I want superior performance, however I have no certain reason for that”.

in fact, any solution will be fast enough as writing logs is not too heavy operation.
the only thing one have to keep in mind is not to use any indexes in case SQL database used.
that’s all.
So, lets put aside that performance stuff.

The only complete solution would be analyzing web-server logs.
Any other method will not give you complete picture. Say, if there is some image hotlinked on other sites and makes heavy load because of that, you’d never notice that if you log only requests to php scripts.

So, you can run crontab-based script running every night parsing access logs and getting comprehensive information of all users and bots activity.