Re: Count of downloads from web site.

You don't say what your OS is, so I can't offer a portable solution for your architecture, but you could certainly use one of several methods, depending on your needs, and the speed at which your site is being hit. Here's a few:

Provide a drop-file to count the times a user has hit the link, which you can do through any of the hundreds of 'web-counter' scripts out there.
Note, this is subject to race attacks, if 10 people all want to download the file at the same time. You'll have to implement locking here.
I've seen a few, but if you want to have a "You're the 'nth' person to download this file" type of interface, you want an ordinal script. If this is just for your own personal needs, that's not necessary. Stay away from the SSI versions, you want to roll this natively into your download script, likely.
Increment the number of downloads through a database such as MySQL, which allows you to push the locking down to the database itself and substantially decrease the issue of race attacks. Basically you'd have a script like:
http://www.you.com/download.pl?file="file0000.exe"

With this you could also store the incoming IP, host, time, date, and referer of the person downloading it, if you wanted to keep that information (maybe good for charting, graphs, whatever)
How about just parsing your web logs for the downloads instead? No issues with locking, no race attacks, and can be done hourly/nightly, etc. TMTOWTDI.

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Re: Re: Count of downloads from web site. by Anonymous Monk on Jul 15, 2002 at 19:13 UTC
Thanks for all the replies. I have a Solaris 7 OS web server	[reply]