What is the best way to count page views in PHP/MySQL?

Question

And by best I mean most efficient, right now placing this on my post.php file is the only thing I can think of:

$query = mysql_query(" UPDATE posts SET views + 1 WHERE id = '$id' "); 

is there a better way, a method that would consume less server resources. I ask because if this was a small app I would have no problem with the above, but I am trying to build something that will be used by a lot of people and I want to be as query conscious as possible.

Answer 1

If you're interested in conserving resources and still using SQL for reporting, and precise # doesn't matter, you could try sampling like this (modify sample rate to suit your scale):

$sample_rate = 100; if(mt_rand(1,$sample_rate) == 1) {     $query = mysql_query(" UPDATE posts SET views = views + {$sample_rate} WHERE id = '{$id}' ");     // execute query, etc }