How do you track page views on a view

Question

Is there a plugin for this or a gem that I can use. I was thinking about just writing it to a table when a view was called in the controller. Is this the best way? I see stackoverflow has this functionality how do they do it?

Answer 1

Obviously, there are third party statistics services (Google Analytics, Mint, etc...), but if you must do it yourself then doing a write each time someone hits a page will seriously impact your DB.

I'd write individual hits to an intermediate file on the filesystem or memcached, then fire a task every 10 - 15 minutes that will parse that data and insert it into the database.

Answer 2

Google Analytics - Let Google or some other third-party analytics provider handle it for you for free. I don't think you want to do file writes on every page load - potentially costly. Another option is to store the information in memory and write to the database periodically instead of on every page load.

[EDIT] This is an interesting question. I asked for help on this issue of what's more efficient - db writes vs file writes - there's some good feedback there too.

Answer 3

If you just wanted to get something in there easily you could use a real time analytics provder like W3 Counter

It gives you real time data (as opposed to Google Analytics) and is relatively simple to deploy (a few lines in your global template) but may not give you the granularity that you want. I guess it depends on if you are wanting this information programmatically to display/use in the app or for statistical purposes.