How to track my visitors ? [best perfomance]

I've been asked to create a custom 'tracker' in PHP, to know where users are coming from and where they are going on the site.

I'm thinking of writing a simple script, which connects to a database, writes the ip, browser, and time of the visit, then closes the db link.

Is this the right way 开发者_Python百科to do it ?

I've found a few similar questions on stackoverflow, but none mentioned performance.

Is there a reason you can't use a solution such as Google Analytics - its free and has some nice features such as heat maps which show traffic flow

The main disadvantage is that it requires you to embed some javascript on all the pages - which means that its client side

I suppose it's another question of the kind "I want superior performance, however I have no certain reason for that".

in fact, any solution will be fast enough as writing logs is not too heavy operation.
the only thing one have to keep in mind is not to use any indexes in case SQL database used.
that's all.
So, lets put aside that performance stuff.

The only complete solution would be analyzing web-server logs.
Any other method will not give you complete picture. Say, if there is some image hotlinked on other sites and makes heavy load because of that, you'd never notice that if you log only requests to php scripts.

So, you can run crontab-based script running every night parsing access logs and getting comprehensive information of all users and bots activity.

Check Piwik or New Relic, if you need more customization, you should take a look at Webalyzer and Visitors

N.B: You can customize Piwik by creating plugins http://geekmonkey.org/articles/34-how-to-write-a-piwik-plugin

Perhaps you need some special software like Webalyzer? (it's free and quite powerful)

Performance is easy to say but much harder to define. It depends on zillion circumstances and while i'm say: this is the best performance i can get - you might say: hey, what's this?

Personally i recommend Google Analytics. It does almost everything if you need (almost things you didn't need). Maybe you can get a small 'performance' boost if you storing it's source locally but there's a chance it's cached in users' browser yet.

Or, if you prefer open source solutions, give a shot for Piwik.

Piwik does just that, and it does it very well. There is also a Tracking API that you can use to track a lot of things about your visitors, using PHP or any other language (REST API). See more information on http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-api/

Also it is very modular & fast, don't reinvent the wheel :)