What's an efficient way to track the view count?

[knopix]

How do websites like YouTube track their video's video count?
For instance, YouTube only refreshes the video views every several hours, but it obviously still runs an update query on every page load.

I would like to have a "top 10 items of the day" list, as well as top 10 this week and top 10 this month - but how do I do this efficiently?

[hexburner]

Depends on the approach you want.
What do you understand as '1 view'?
Imagine I'm a visitor, and I view a clip 3 times in a row because it's so hilarious, would this count for 3 views, or for 1 view?

[wheeler]

perhaps they update one database, then synchronize with the other every few hours. I doubt that you'd have any trouble using live stats unless you have a very busy site.

[knopix]

Depends on the approach you want.
What do you understand as '1 view'?
Imagine I'm a visitor, and I view a clip 3 times in a row because it's so hilarious, would this count for 3 views, or for 1 view?

Count it as 3 views - it's not worth the trouble of tracking IPs or cookies.

perhaps they update one database, then synchronize with the other every few hours. I doubt that you'd have any trouble using live stats unless you have a very busy site.

I am running several larges sites on 1 server.
But suppose you have a single database that (as you said) tracks views and another which synchronizes with the content - how do you check which are the most popular items of the day, week, and month?

[hexburner]

Count it as 3 views - it's not worth the trouble of tracking IPs or cookies.

That's the easiest and quickest way indeed.

Don't bother synchronizing databases yet, maybe when your website gets alot of traffic you might want to consider this, but just not yet.

[knopix]

That's the easiest and quickest way indeed.

Don't bother synchronizing databases yet, maybe when your website gets alot of traffic you might want to consider this, but just not yet.

Okay, but it doesn't answer any of the aforementioned questions.

[praetor]

You create a table 'stats' with columns 'id_video, `date`, no_views ' with unique index on (id_video,`date`) .
When somene views a video you do

insert into stats values(?,date(now()),1)  on duplicate key no_views=no_views+1;
 
select id_video, no_views from stats where `date` = date(now()) order by no_views desc limit 10

[wheeler]

I am running several larges sites on 1 server.
But suppose you have a single database that (as you said) tracks views and another which synchronizes with the content - how do you check which are the most popular items of the day, week, and month?

I am only theorizing here, but I would imagine if you have a database dedicated to counting views, then you would have a synchronization schedule - the data that you actively use for example on "today's most viewed videos" would just be whatever your normal database is telling you. You wouldn't retrieve it from the "stats" database, that would defeat the purpose.

That's the easiest and quickest way indeed.

Don't bother synchronizing databases yet, maybe when your website gets ALOT of traffic you might want to consider this, but just not yet.

Agreed, I doubt this is even worrying about, I don't think it would be a big deal to go

UPDATE video_views SET counter = counter + 1 WHERE id = $video_id"

I have used similar code on a large site before without issue, combined with all the other database activity.