GeoIP2 location tracking for high traffic instances

General questions
1

Hello!
I’m looking into the location tracking options for Matomo. There is two options for reading GeoIP databases.

  1. Using PHP API to read the database.
  2. Using HTTP-server module.

The documentation says option 2 is faster and more accurate. But that solution only works with normal browser tracking. Then i saw there is an optional C extension for the PHP API used in option 1 recommended for high traffic instances. Is this solution equally good as solution 2 or is that still faster? Solution 1 with the C extension seems more simple and less complex than solution 2.

2

Hi,

Using 1. with the C extension should be the easiest solution and faster than without the C extension.

But the only way to know how fast it is in your setup would be to try it out.

In case you have not found this page yet:
https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_164/

3

Thanks for the answer! Do you know if the http-module (solution 2) always is faster than 1 with the C extension? I read in this article that there was no performance metrics for the Nginx module. Is that still the case?

4

Hi,

I don’t think that the http-module will be faster (or slower) than the PHP module (with C module) as after all they are doing the exact same lookup, just in one case Matomo does it and in the other one the webserver does it and Matomo trusts its output.

I don’t think anyone on the Matomo team is using the nginx module, but that doesn’t mean much apart from that you probably need to do some testing yourself.