website statistics

[safra]

I am breaking my head on finding an efficient way to log website statistics using a MySQL table.

I would like to be able to see how many times a page was visited within a specific period.

Am I right that there is no other way then to insert a new row in the mysql table with the following data: page, date

There will be a huge number of rows after a while!

Or is there a better method?

Thanks,
Ron

[notionlogic]

If you look at it logically...

You want to track page names and dates so YES you have to store page names and dates 😃

In actual fact, there won't be that much data unless you have a hugely popular site. If it IS popular then simply do what I do and clear out earlier historical data (e.g. remove rows over 3 months old) every so often.

In my case, I'm tracking VISITORS, SESSIONS and PAGES in seperate (linked) tables on a site regularly getting 200,000+ page impressions per month and that works fine for me. In fact I'm even storing other data for reference purposes like referring url, browser string, hostname and such like ! 🙂

[safra]

Yes, probably it is a good idea to remove rows older then a couple of months and use a different table to log the total number of hits.

Thanks