Re: Website Hit counter and Logger

Richard Lynch wrote:

On Fri, April 20, 2007 11:06 am, Amos Vryhof wrote:

I build websites for a lot of people, and many of them want statistics and hit counters for their websites.

Webalizer Analog

Webalizer works fine, and the output is good (though I doubt it's as accurate since it's tied into the hit counter). That part of the script is fully functional.

You can probably find binaries for both, or download logfiles and run them offline or...

Since not all of them are on a dedicated or virtual host, I cobbled together a script that builds log files, and displays a graphical hit counter, and another script that runs Webalizer and goes to the report.

Wait... You CREATE logfiles from PHP as if they were Apache logfiles, and run them through Webalizer?... Surely the host provides access to log files, no?...

Yes, the host provides access to log files for domains and virtual hosts. The logs I create are for specific subdirectories where the sites reside. Believe me, if I was in charge of how this was run, each customer would have a virtual host of their own and creating the logs wouldn't need to happen. As it is, I have to maintain two versions of the script. One for the site-in-a-directory situation, and the other for virtual hosts that uses server logs.

My dilemma is that the hit counter portion of the script works at first, then at some point loses track, and displays a number that is way off from the actual number.

Way off low, or way off high?

Way off low. I assume something causing the number to be reset to zero at some point.

I was originally using code that read the number from a text file, added 1 to it, then wrote it back using file_get/put_contents. Since then I have changed to if (file_exists($logfile)) { $fp = fopen("$logfile", "r+"); flock($fp, 1); $count = fgets($fp, 4096); $count += 1; fseek($fp,0);

Seems to me you need another flock($fp, 2) here to get exclusive write access to the file...

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I had a hunch that it might have been happening when two people visit at once and the server just gives up on who gets write access to the file, but I haven't had much time to familiarize myself with file locking.

Otherwise, you haven't avoided the race condition at all, you've just added a bunch of flock calls that don't do much of anything...

fputs($fp, $count); flock($fp, 3); fclose($fp); } else { echo "Can't find file, check '\$logfile'<BR>"; } which I found in an example somewhere (maybe on the example code page?) but that seems to lose track as well.