speed up stats and/or move them to a separate app

[kenirwin]

The stats page is slow, and sometimes it seems to bog down the whole app. Example: I just tried to look at this week's stats instead of the whole several-years' worth -- it failed to load AND I was unable to load any myguide app page until I restarted the app.

May also want to lock down the stats route so it requires a special login -- this will prevent others from accidentally or maliciously bogging down the app. At least I can restart it!

[kenirwin]

Loading the /stats reports can be slow. Could caching make that faster?

I'm imagining that we'd have a cronjob run every night and it would update files in the /cache directory. If those files are older than X amount of time (maybe a default + config setting) then they would be calculated in real time; if the cache is newer than whatever the setting says, use the cached file.

It may be that we'd have to filter the cached file (e.g. by date or whatever) -- it could make for a bit of a spaghetti tangle of conditions, but worth exploring to make the stats reporting more efficient.

Also worth exploring: what is the slowdown in reporting coming from; is it from data retrieval or from rendering? If it's rendering, then maybe caching isn't the answer.