In what ways can PHP be used to efficiently generate and deliver real-time visitor statistics to external users without compromising server performance?

One way to efficiently generate and deliver real-time visitor statistics to external users without compromising server performance is to use caching mechanisms to store and retrieve the data. By caching the visitor statistics, you can reduce the number of database queries and processing required to generate the statistics on each request, thus improving performance. Additionally, you can use AJAX requests to update the statistics in real-time without refreshing the entire page.

// Check if the visitor statistics are already cached
$stats = apc_fetch('visitor_stats');

if (!$stats) {
    // If not cached, generate the visitor statistics
    $stats = generate_visitor_stats();

    // Cache the visitor statistics for a specific duration (e.g., 1 hour)
    apc_store('visitor_stats', $stats, 3600);
}

// Output the visitor statistics
echo json_encode($stats);