When running a public-facing website like Eventbrite, there are a number of reasons to keep track of your most active IP Addresses, API Keys or User IDs. Unfortunately, if you have a site that sees significant traffic, the volume of data you need to store and process to generate these “Heavy Hitter” statistics can become daunting.
To illustrate some of the issues with trying to generate these counts, let’s simulate a naive counting algorithm with some Python like this: