Re: AW: Logging user's movements

[prev] [thread] [next] [Date index for 2005/02/04]

On 4 Feb 2005, at 14:16, James Smith wrote:

> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Denis Banovic wrote:
>> I have a very similar app running in mod_perl with about 1/2 mio hits 
>> a day. I need to do some optimisation, so I'm just interessted what 
>> optimisations that you are using brought you the best improvements.
>> Was it preloading modules in the startup.pl or caching the 1x1 gif 
>> image, or maybe optimising the database cache ( I'm using mysql ).
>> I'm sure you are also having usage peaks, so it would be interessting 
>> how many hits(inserts)/hour can a single server  machine handle 
>> approx.
>
> Simplest thing to do is hijack the referer logs, and then parse
> them at the end. You just need to add a unique ID for each session
> (via a cookie or in the URL) which is added to the logs [or placed
> in a standard logged variable]
>

I totally agree with James. I'm thinking of switching to just using a 
log file for this rather than it being live (as I only generate reports 
once a day). I'm actually using a log based system for user tracking, 
which was implemented after this counter. The counter system is used to 
count how many times a product appears in search results / how many 
times someone views it in detail, a good tip, if you have 20 products 
on the page, Do not call the counter for every one, just pass all the 
id's in - obvious but if your implementing it in a rush you might miss! 
It used to be part of the main search code, but this prevented caching.

The optimisations I did were:

Put in startup.pl (and read the image in as a global from BEGIN block)

use Apache::DBI->connect_on_init() so DBH is from the pool of 
connections and not a new one each time (I'm using MySQL as well).

I have a light (non mod_perl) apache at the front, which proxies to a 
mod_perl apache that runs the module, and the database is on a 3rd 
machine.

I've not got to the point of it overloading the system, so I haven't 
investigated the actual hit rate.

Cheers

Leo