I am looking for a way to track how many times different pages are visited on my site. I am considering using a MySQL table to do this, so that I can link the information to other tables and create recommendations customized for a user based on what products that user has already viewed, as well as creating lists of popular products for other users.

My dilemma is, would this be efficient, or would I be wasting resources by storing this data in a database instead of a log file? I would hope I would be able to analyze the database in real time and avoid the overhead of constantly parsing a frequently accessed log file, but if it would drain the resources of the server, I would have to find a different solution.

Your thoughts, comments, advice and suggestions are appreciated.

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