PHP，计算和显示每日，每周和每月统计数据

Question

I am a newbie with PHP and therefore this is more of a conceptual question or maybe even a question about 'best practices'.

Often, I see websites with stats drawn from their database. For example, let's say it is a sales lead website. It may have stats at the top of the page like:

NEW SALES LEADS YESTERDAY: 123

NEW SALES LEADS THIS MONTH: 556

NEW SALES LEADS THIS YEAR: 3870

Obviously, this should not be calculated everytime the page is displayed, right? That would potentially be a large burden on the server? How do people cache this type of data. Any best practices? I thought I writing a CRON jobs that would calculate it on a daily basis and insert to a database. What are your ideas? Thank you!

Answer 1

You can calculate it once and then store it in a xcache. Here, however there doesn't seem to be a need for a cron. The query can run one time and store the result in xcache. Important thing here would be to set the expiration time of the stored value according to your use case. For eg. if you need to store daily stats like above, set the expiration time to be a few hours. In case of data which gets updated every minute, you can set the expiration time to be a few minutes.

Something like this.

$newSalesLeadYest;
if(xcache_isset("newSalesLeadYest")){
    $newSalesLeadYest = xcache_get("newSalesLeadYest");
} else{
    $newSalesLeadYest = runQueryToFetchStat();
    //Cache set for X secs
    xcache_set("newSalesLeadYest", $newSalesLeadYest, X);
}