Page View Counter like on StackOverFlow

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.

Answer 2

An efficient way may be : Store your counters in the Application object, you may persist it to file/DB periodically and on application close.