I'm looking for best ways of counting page views; I've the following methods in my mind -
Simply have a column to hold the page_views and increment the entry upon every page load.
Use Redis to capture the page views and run a cron job every 5 or 10 minutes to update the page_views column
Maybe use Google Analytics API to get the page-view count tracked by Google. I'm not sure if this is possible.
My current pages generate about 7 queries per page-view for Guests and about 12 for logged-in members. The main question is when one of the pages gets lot of traffic - and my question is should I care about not having an additional query to update pageviews?
I think that Redis is the best option for this problem, but I am not sure why you would need a cron job to update the page_views column. I think that this video by Jeffrey can help you. Here he shows the trending videos, but you can use the same approach for page views. He also gives a tip on what to do when the same user is refreshing the page.
Or from the same series, the Thread Views videos are what you need.
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