Calculate Page views efficiently

Hi,      I am coding forum software in rails. In forum software how many times a thread is viewed is an important metric .one way of doing this is creating a before_filter which logs in a view everytime a page is requested.

actually just because i need to run this before_filter i can't do page caching which can drastically improve the performance of the app. can anyone suggest a better way of logging views of every thread.

Maybe with a distinct insert into a history table? thread_views (thread_id int, view_count) outside of the before_filter... somewhere else?

Or parsing of the logs?

sullivan,               thanks for the reply. But the very act of inserting into any table means i cannot use page caching which will be aserious performance penalty to pay.

i will explore the logs option though. thanks

Cheers, Deepu.