Update on Custom Logging

After spending yesterday figuring out how to write custom log files, today I changed my mind and went a different route. The problem with these log files is that they would need to be parsed to generate the reports I would need to generate. While this could easily and efficiently be done with something like Python, in order to stick with using PHP I decided to take a completely different approach.

I created a statistics table where I can just increment the appropriate column rather than writing a whole line to a text file. My concern with this was that it would down the site substantially, so rather than recording the data while the user is performing the searches I created a Job and queue it to be processed later. This doesn't help with the server load, but it does remove the response time for the user as a factor.