Question

What I wish to achieve is – log all information about each and every visit to every page ofmy website (like ip address, browser, referring page, etc). Now this is easy to do.

What I am interested is doing this in a way so as to cause minimum overhead (runtime) in the php scripts. What is the best approach for this efficiency-wise:

1) Log all information to a database table

2) Write to a file (from php directly)

3) Call a C++ executable, that will write this info to a file in parallel [so the script can continue execution without waiting for the file write to occur …… is this even possible]

I may be trying to optimize unnecessarily/prematurely, but still – any thoughts / ideas on this would be appreciated. (I think efficiency of file write/logging can really be a concern if I have say 100 visits per minute…)

Thanks & Regards,

JP

Answer 1

1. Robust but could be a pain to implement
2. Be careful for multithreading. What happens if two users call simultaneously your php script and the file is already open for writing.
3. Same as 2 but the exception will occur in the C++ executable.

I would suggest you using a logging framework such as log4php.