Complex data manipulation

Anon

This question relates to a counter im working on. I have an array, $data_timestamp[], which obviously contains the timestamps of every hit.

What I need to do is find the the "top" hour. That is I want to find one particular hour which has the highest number of hits ever. I do NOT want to know which is the busiest hour.

Whatever partial solutions ive come up with are very inefficient, buggy and complicated.

Any help would be appreciated.

tomhath

You'll have to clarify what you mean by "top" hour. Is it:

1) The one (of the 24 hours in a day) that had the most hits (e.g. 8-9pm is your top hour)

2) A time which, plus or minus 30 minutes, had more hits than any other time (e.g. the hour between 10:22am and 11:22am had more hits than any other hour during the day).

Neither should be difficult to find, but #2 would involve a lot of calculations because you have to compare every timestamp to every other timestamp.

Anon

Number 2 is exactly what I want :p

tomhath

The only way I can think of would be brute force.

Sort the original array by timestamp.

Step through it checking how many timestamps are less than 60 minutes after the current entry and keep track of which entry is highest. That's the start of your hour.