This method would not work for too long, when we talk about logging
information we end up talking a lot of information to be kept. A cookie
hasn't enough in size to hold much information at all. It would depend on
what information you are requiring to capture, in this case I would go for
the log everything to a DB, on a daily basis squeeze the information you
require and store into another table. This means that you can keep the DB to
a small size but getting the information you require, and throwing away the
junk. I use this method in a site I developed. I prefer this method of web
log programs that run under the OS, because they can't get all the extra
data you can do on the fly.
Also speed should of a site should never be an issue, it should always be
budgeted to be upgraded to more memory or faster CPU...
-----Original Message-----
From: Zachary Bedell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, 23 June 2000 10:32 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: Tracking users through a site
Another possibility, if cookies are an option, would be to continuely pass a
"Click Stream" cookie back & forth to the user. At each page request, just
take the current cookie that they've sent back to you, append the current
page w/ keywords to the end, and send it back to the user.
Alot of sites do that very thing, but it has the potential of creating a
rather large cookie if the user spends any amount of time on your site. You
could potentially have kilobytes of extra information sent both directions
on every single page request.
My personal feeling on logging-type things like this is that you end up with
a MUCH more reliable site if you offload as much of the processing to later.
So in this case, I'd recommend logging each page hit, then latter (perhaps
hourly, even) running analysis on the per-page logs to aggregate them into
something more useful for your needs.
Best regards,
Zac Bedell
-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Surma [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 7:33 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Tracking users through a site
On Thursday, June 22, 2000, Gina Shillitani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>We're looking at about 86,000 hits per day on the reporting server, which
is
>where I need to collect this information. I'm trying to figure out if there
>is a way I can track a single user through each visit to the site and
record
>the entire session to one record in the table. Example, the user with token
>XYZ requested a.cfm, b.cfm?var=keyword, c.cfm?var=keyword&var2=5, on
>6/25/2000 at 8:56 AM and spent 15 minutes total on the site. This would be
>preferable to recording single page hits and I do need to record any
>variables that are passed to individual pages.
As others have mentioned you could record each page view by using the
application.cfm and the cgi variables. To get to the summary data you are
looking for you could run a scheduled event at the end of each day that
queries the data for individual visits and loads the results in a summary
table and when completed clears the 86,000 records out of the log file.
--
Lee Surma
Public Radio International
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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