Time-based counter design

Rails
1

Hello group,

Let’s say I want to list the items clicked the most the past 24 hours.
Sure,
I could do a query of a click table and count all the clicks the past 24
hours for each item and sort. After a while the click table will fill up
and
that count query will become slow.

I can think of 2 options:

  1. Index the click count in a separate table, and increment the click
    count
    of each item. At each click, I guess I could do a click count of the
    past 24
    hours and store that click in a counter table. But it seems doing the
    click
    count at each click and saving that to the db might slow things down a
    bit.

  2. I could count on the basis of a day and reset the counter table at
    the
    end of each day using a cron job. For example, at 12:00am reset the
    counter
    table and then start incrementing the counter from 0 at midnight. I’d
    like
    to do it without a cron job.

Is there a better way to index clicks over a 24 hour period?

Thanks,

Steve O.
http://www.smarkets.net