[Answer]-Updating a hit counter when an image is accessed in Django

Set up a cron task to parse your Apache/Nginx/whatever access logs on a regular basis, perhaps with something like pylogsparser.

You could use memcache to store the counters and then periodically persist them to the database. There are risks that memcache will evict the value before it’s been persisted but this could be acceptable to you.

This article provides more information and highlights a risk arising when using hosted memcache with keys distributed over multiple servers. http://bjk5.com/post/36567537399/dangers-of-using-memcache-counters-for-a-b-tests