Most effiecient way to display some stats using PHP/MySQL

Question

I need to show some basic stats on the front page of our site like the number of blogs, members, and some counts - all of which are basic queries.

Id prefer to find a method to run these queries say every 30 mins and store the output but im not sure of the best approach and I don't really want to use a cron. Basically, I don't want to make thousands of queries per day just to display these results.

Any ideas on the best method for this type of function?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Unfortunately, cron is better and reliable solution.

is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. 是类Unix计算机操作系统中的基于时间的作业调度程序。 The name cron comes from the word "chronos", Greek for "time". Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email.

If you are to store the output into disk file,
you can always check the filemtime is lesser than 30 minutes,
before proceed to re-run the expensive queries.

Answer 2

There is nothing at all wrong with using a cron to store this kind of stuff somewhere.
If you're looking for a bit more sophisticated caching methods, I suggest reading into memcached or APC , which could both provide a solution for your problem.

Answer 3

Cron Job是最好的方法，我认为没有其他可行的方法。

Answer 4

You have many to do this, I think the good not the best, you can store your data on table and display it every 30 min. using the function sleep()
I recommend you to take a look at wordpress blog system, and specially at the plugin BuddyPress..

I did the same some time ago, and every time someone load the page, the query do the job and retrieve the information from database, I remenber It was something like

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM my_table

and I got the number of posts in my case.

Anyway, there are so many approach. Good Luck.

Dont forget The cron is always your best friend.

Answer 5

Using cron is the simplest way to solve the problem.

One good reason for not using cron - you'll be generating the stats even if nobody will request them.

Depending on the length of time it takes to generate the data (you might want to keep track of the previous counts and just add counts where the timestamp is greater than the previous run - with appropriate indexes!) then you could trigger this when a request comes in and the data looks as if it is stale.

Note that you should keep the stats in the database and think about how to implement a mutex to avoid multiple requests trying to update the cache at the same time.

However the right solution would be to update the stats every time a record is added. Unless you've got very large traffic volumes, the overhead would be minimal. While 'SELECT count(*) FROM some_table' will run very quickly you'll obviously run into problems if you don't simply want to count all the rows in a table (eg if blogs and replies are held in the same table). Indeed, if you were to implement the stats update as a trigger on the relevant tables, then you wouldn't need to make any changes to your PHP code.