This depends on [1] so we're not going to need that immediately, but in
order to help Erik Zachte with his RfC [2] to track unique media views in
Media Viewer, I'm going to need to use something almost exactly like
EventLogging. The main difference being that it should skip writing to the
database and write to a log file instead.
That's because we'll be recording around 20-25M image views per day, which
would needlessly overload EventLogging for little purpose since the data
will be used for offline stats generation and doesn't need to be made
available in a relational database. Of course if storage space and
EventLogging capacity were no object, we could just use EL and keep the
ever-growing table forever, but I have the impression that we want to be
reasonable here and only write to a log, since that's what Erik needs.
So here's the question: for a specific schema, can EventLogging work the
way it does but only record hits to a log file (maybe it already does that
before hitting the DB?) and not write to the DB? If not, how difficult
would it be to make EL capable of doing that?
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44815
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Media_file_request_coun…