Question

What is the best way to implement the page view counter like the ones they have here on the site where each question has a ‘Views’ counter?

Factoring in Performance and Scalability issues.

Answer 1

The counter i optimized works like this:

UPDATE page_views SET counter = counter + 1 WHERE page_id = x if (affected_rows == 0 ) {    INSERT INTO page_views (page_id, counter) VALUES (x, 1) } 

This way you run 2 query for the first view, the other views require only 1 query.