saving information in file in php

Question

hey guys

i want to write a tracking system and now i can save in my Mysql database . but saving information about each ip that visits is a huge work for mysql

so i think if i could save the information in a file , then there is no discussion about database and its problems .

but to begin this : i realy dont know how to save in a file in a way that i can read it with no problem and show the details

i need to show information about all ips in rows , after saving in a file

what should i do to save and show in row order ( table )

php/mysql

Answer 1

I don't understand why you think that reading and writing this data into a file by yourself is going to be faster than a database?

What you are essentially saying, right, is that you can write code that will do exactly what the database is going to do, but better?

I think most people will agree with me: you will see major problems with speed if you do NOT go with the database on this one.

Answer 2

What webserver are you using? Doesn't that have built in logging that you can use?

Answer 3

I do not know if I understood your question correctly you want to create a log file

You could always do something like this if you really need to save the data to a file

To write the data to a file do the following

$file = 'logfile.txt';

if(file_exist($file)){
    $fh = fopen($file, 'w');
}else{
    $fh = fopen($file, 'a');
}

$data = $dt."\t\t".$ipaddr."\t\t".$hostnm."\t\t".$referer."\t\t".$pg."\t\t".$pagetitle."\t\t".$dbi."\n";

fwrite($fh,$data);

fclose($fh);

To read the data from the file use the PHP file function which saves the data to array . Then you can search the array for the relevant data, readmore about it here http://php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

Answer 4

i always store all the data about users in database. and it works fast, and is not expensive. there are many ways to write the data in the file, but do you need them? i think no.

Answer 5

Is there any particular reason you can't use the server's own logs as a data store? It's pretty trivial to tear apart an IIS or Apache access_log and parse out the information you want.

If you're only interested in a certain sub-set of the access log (ie: hits on actual pages, and ignore images/javascript/css/flash/whatever files), you can parse out just those particular hits. Then take that reduced data set and stuff it into MySQL on another server.

After that, the database is a far better place to store the relevant hit data, as it can do the data mining for you, and handle all the grouping/counting without breaking a sweat. Think of what happens when you load a few hundred million hits and try to keep track of per-IP data - your in-memory data set will grow quite quickly and may exceed the available memory. Doing the summing/counting/averageing/etc... in the database will handle all such concerns for you; you just have to worry about interpreting the results afterwards.

And just as an optimization hint: store your IP addresses as an unsigned integer field, not varchar(15). They're really just 32bit numbers. The overhead of the one-time initial ascii->numeric translation will be utterly trivial next to the repeated hits in the analysis stage when you're trying to apply subnet masks and whatnot:

INSERT INTO log (ip) VALUES (INET_ATON('10.0.0.1'));