Hit Counter

[Cameron Habib]

I'm creating a hit counter, using PHP on an HTML page. I have it set up so that a new entry is created for every visitor, storing their IP, computer environment, ect. I now need a way to show how many hits I have. Would something like

$query="SELECT id FROM counter WHERE id > 0";
$hits = mysql_query($query);
echo "There are ".mysql_num_rows($hits)"";

be an ok solution or would that get bogged down after a while? The table is set up to assign an auto_increment number for each new line. I would like to be able to pull that number off of the last line entered but I don't know the code for that. Thanks.