You're right, it depends very much on your own design philosophy as well and which web-server-components you like to use of course. I was simply suggesting a different approach. You know to allow "masking" which locations of your site to have visit incremented counters from within httpd.conf or sub-configuration (for example a virtual server directive and/or more specific locations).
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About "advisory-locking", I do not understand what you mean to say. Could you
explain? I meant using files and directories instead of some special database.
>Just a comment, using .htaccess files is said be bad for performance: What else are you suggesting that is more secure and fast than .htaccess?