don't log script hit every time

[Anon]

HI! I'm a little at a loss, I have a combination of scripts that keep state between a couple flash movies. One of them (for sake of argument "poll.php") is hit every 10 seconds by a flash movie to see the state of a text file has changed. I log all "hits" to the scripts but in this case I don't want a huge amount of log entries as the script is hit often. The constant ($session_id) is the likely candidate for testing - how do I (without a lot of overhead) only log every "x" hits to this script? the code:

// define constants
define("SESSION_FILE_PATH", "..\sessions\");

//initalize slide
$pvtSlide = "";

// check for filename
If (empty($filename)) {

echo "you must specify a filename such as: slave.php?filename=123452231";

exit;

}

// open session file
$sessionFile = SESSION_FILE_PATH . $filename;

$session_id = $filename;

$fp = fopen ($sessionFile, "r");

If ($fp) {

// read file contents into variables

// get the first line (email)
$pvtMasterEmail = fgets ($fp, 50);
$pvtSlaveEmail = fgets ($fp, 50);

// get the second line (signal)
$secondLine = fgets($fp, 50);
$pvtSignal = substr(strchr($secondLine, ","), 1);

// if the signal is 1, get the next line
//If ($pvtSignal == 1) {

// get the third line (slide)$thirdLine = fgets($fp, 50);
$pvtSlide = substr(strchr($thirdLine, ","), 1);

//}

// close file
fflush ($fp);
fclose ($fp);

} else {

echo "cannot open file: " . $sessionFile;

exit;

}

// output file values?
echo "signal=" . rtrim($pvtSignal) . "&slide=" . rtrim($pvtSlide);

$logfile = "d:\inetpub\wwwroot\log\log.txt";

define('LOG', 1); # comment this out if you don't want to log hits.

if (defined("LOG"))
{
$cf = fopen($logfile, "a"); #open file in append mode
#$date=time();
$date = date("M d, Y H:i:s");
$log = "$date\t$session_id\t$REMOTE_ADDR\r";
fwrite($cf, $log);
fclose($cf);
}

Thanks in advance if you have any ideas!

[Anon]

You could try something like this, using PHP's built in session handling:

First put this at the very top of the document so as not to mess with the HTTP headers:
<?php
session_register("hits_logged");
?>
You can use that to store the amount of hits logged so far. Next put this code somewhere before you actually log the hit (obviously):
<?php
if ( isset ( $hits_logged ) ) $hits_logged = 1;
else $hits_logged++;

if ( $hits_logged > $max_hits_to_log ) $log_this_hit = 0;
else $log_this_hit = 1;
?>
Obviously make sure you specify $max_hits_to_log elsewhere in order to determine whether or not we'll log this hit (using $log_this_hit as a flag). Then where you actually log the hit in your script, put it in an if statement like so:
<?php
if ( $log_this_hit )
{
//insert code here to log hit
}
?>

That's all you need to do. PHP's session handling is very advanced. It automatically sets a cookie for you, storing the session id (in order to reference that user's session data on the server) on the user's machine. Alternatively you can add PHPSESSID=<? echo $PHPSESSID; ?> to all the query strings, as long as the ID gets to the server one way or another.
The only difference between $hits_logged and the other variables is that $hits_logged holds its value until the user kills his browser i.e. if we assign it the value 10 in one script, we can echo that same value out in another script executed by the user.

[Anon]

hey thanks - sounds like a good idea - i'll try it!