Building a Bulletproof PHP Analytics System: From DB Schema to Self-Healing Cron Jobs

This article provides a comprehensive walkthrough of building an accurate and robust website analytics system. Starting with the common problem of duplicate sitewide UV counts, we design a scalable database schema and iteratively develop an efficient PHP statistics script. Key topics include performance optimization via in-memory processing, early filtering of bot traffic, and designing a fault-tolerant cron job that automatically backfills missing data. This serves as a complete practical guide for creating a reliable data analysis system.