High Performance Web Site Statistics!

Let’s say you need to find out how much time users are spending on web pages, the common order in which web pages are navigated, and which web pages cause them to leave. Because your popular web site’s resources are running low, you decide to implement a combination of data caching and file storage to capture hit statistics while minimizing memory usage and hard disk activity.

STEP BY STEP

1.      Open your Visual C# ASP.NET application’s Global.asax.cs file and add the following code:

Listing 1 – Capturing Web Site Statistics

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Caching;
using System.Collections;

protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   // Ignore postbacks.
   if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.RequestType=="POST")
         return;
 
   // Get the cache object from application context.
   Cache cache = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Cache;
   ArrayList HitArray = (ArrayList) cache["MyHitArray"];
   if (HitArray == null)
   {
         // Create a two minute sliding expiration.
         TimeSpan ts = new TimeSpan(0,2,0);
         // Insert a HitArray object into data cache
         HitArray = new ArrayList();
         cache.Insert("MyHitArray", HitArray, null, 
               DateTime.MaxValue, ts, CacheItemPriority.Normal, 
               new CacheItemRemovedCallback(RemoveAndWriteCache));
   }
   HitArray.Add(new Hit());
}

public void RemoveAndWriteCache(string key, object value, 
   CacheItemRemovedReason callbackreason) 
{
   // Note: State cannot be retrieved here; therefore the path is hard coded.
   // Workarounds could be to store the path within the cached object or 
   // preferably, to retrieve the path from the web.config file. 
   string filename = 
         @"C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\YourWebAppDir\hits.txt";
   // Create a thread safe TextWriter.
   StreamWriter s = new StreamWriter(filename, true);
   TextWriter writer = TextWriter.Synchronized(s);
   // Write each hit item out to file.
   foreach (Hit hit in (ArrayList) value)
         writer.WriteLine(string.Format("{0};{1};{2}",
               hit.IPAddr, hit.Url, hit.Time.ToString()));
   writer.Close();
} 

2.      Add a new class to your application with the following syntax:

Listing 2 – Class Hit

public class Hit
{
   public string IPAddr;
   public string Url;
   public DateTime Time;
 
   public Hit()
   {
         HttpRequest r = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request;
         IPAddr = r.UserHostAddress;
         Url = r.Url.AbsolutePath;
         Time = DateTime.Now;
   }
}