Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Monitoring dynamic pages viewed when logged in?

James, the first question you need to ask yourself is, "How quickly do I really need this access log data?" In other words, do you really need to log the info into your RDBMS immeditely, or can you you write it to a log file, and then parse it out later and load it into your RDBMS in a batch process?

Stephen, I hadn't heard of any aD enhancements to the ns_log module. Can you fill us in, please?

Back when we were discussing and implementing a user tracking feature for a site I worked on at aD, the consensus was that logging to the AOLserver acess log and then parsing the info out later is almost always the way to go. (This should always give you better scaleability than trying to stuff non-time-critical user tracking into your RDBMS on the fly.) Vadim Nasardinov came up with a simple (if non-intuitive) way to log arbitrary stuff like user_id to the AOLserver access log, but that didn't require any changes to the stock ns_log module that came with AOLserver 3.2+ad12.

There is no ACS data wharehouse package! There is Richard Li's old pre-alpha Clickstream package (and his Master's thesis), but while that's definitely worth learning from, you probably wouldn't want to run it as is.