[ctype_alnum]

Thats probably a load balancer IP and google have a habit of changing things. Its never a good idea to hardcode IP addresses for that reason, you will go from it being slow to not working at all.

[Kode]

Looks like a large part of it is looking up the google domain

replacing

$url = 'www.google-analytics.com'; 
$fp = fsockopen($url, 80, $errno, $errstr, 5); 

with

$fp=fsockopen('149.3.176.53', 80); 

significantly sped up the requests, only issue is google might change the ip, I could save the ip in memcache though and have it expire every hour or something, that should still signifcantly speed things up.

[Kode]

This is interesting, I have been unit testing on a cheap VPS I have, and on that particular VPS with tracking turned on it averages about 13 requests a second, with it turned off it averages about 1,000 requests a second... that's a significat difference. And that is regardless of using register_shutdown_function or doing it directly

[Kode]

found the issue, lol, I'm missing an extra \r\n before outputting the fields

[Kode]

I tried register_shutdown_function with the curl version and it made no difference, maybe the opposite in fact it seemed like throughput went down

[Kode]

interesting, the other interesting thing is they are using that with sockets, so it seems like socket calls should work, but i just cant get them showing up

[mike_]

I was just looking at this http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/ and can see they use register_shutdown_function to send calls to GA after the script has run. It won't make the calls any faster, but it would get your pages/API results to the client faster as PHP won't block waiting for the GA call to finish.

[Kode]

I tried changing the curl request to analytics to a socket call, it doesn't seem to have worked though, if I run the curl version I can see it immediately in analytics real-time, but it doesn't seem to show up when using the socket version, anyone have an ideas?

Curl

        private function track() {
            //set POST variables
            if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'])) {
                $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'];
            }    
            $url = 'http://www.google-analytics.com/collect';
            $fields = array(
                'v' => '1',
                'tid' => $this->GA_ID,
                'cid' => $this->gaParseCookie(),
                't' => 'pageview',
                'dh' => 'webservice.fanart.tv',
                'dp' => $this->ttype.' - '.$_GET["api_key"].' - '.$this->project,
                'dt' => $this->tid,
                'uip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
            );
            $fields_string = http_build_query($fields);
            //die($fields_string);
            //open connection
            $ch = curl_init();

            //set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
            curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
            curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, true);
            curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
            //execute post
            $result = curl_exec($ch);

            //close connection
            curl_close($ch);
        } 

Socket

        private function track() {
            //set POST variables
            if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'])) {
                $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'];
            }    
            $url = 'www.google-analytics.com';
            $page = '/collect';
            $fields = array(
                'v' => '1',
                'tid' => $this->GA_ID,
                'cid' => $this->gaParseCookie(),
                't' => 'pageview',
                'dh' => 'webservice.fanart.tv',
                'dp' => $this->ttype.' - '.$_GET["api_key"].' - '.$this->project,
                'dt' => $this->tid,
                'uip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
            );
            $fields_string = http_build_query($fields);


            $fp = fsockopen($url, 80, $errno, $errstr, 5);

            $output = "POST $page HTTP/1.1\r\n";
            $output .= "Host: $url\r\n";
            $output .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
            $output .= "Content-Length: ".strlen($fields_string)."\r\n";
            $output .= "Connection: close\r\n";

            $output .= $fields_string;
            //die($output);
            fwrite($fp, $output);
            
            fclose($fp);

        }