Efficient PHP/MySQL Page Hit Counter

[futureal]

Yesterday at 09:44 AM filburt1 said this in Post #3
Never, ever, ever use * in a query...except, according to the MySQL people, when it's COUNT(*) without a WHERE clause.

Try:
[sql]
SELECT COUNT(some id column with unique values) FROM counter WHERE page = 0;
[/sql]

I tried messing around with enumerating the query but the results were not much faster, if any. At best the average dropped from ~4 seconds to ~3 seconds when selecing about 400,000 out of 800,000 records.

If anybody has experience in writing a counter designed to handle > 1 million hits, I'd love to hear about it.