bytes saved in real-time

My organization is using Squid to "Save the Bits" and I would like to
display the real-time stats (5 minutes intervals) of the bytes saved. I
run nightly jobs (Squidtimes and squid-stats v1.4.) to analyze the
access.log, but I would like to retrieve real-time data to incorporate
into our bandwidth usage graph. I am trying to display a graph that
with show how much bandwidth the campus is using along with how much
they would be using without Squid.

The computer that hosts Squid also hosts an FTP server and a Web server
(hopefully not for long though), so watching the traffic to and from the
server won't work. I need to get the HIT bytes from Squid itself. This
is where my question comes in, how do I grab that type of real-time
data?

I figure I have three choices:

1. Pipe the tail of the access.log long through a script to grab the
data. This method should slow things down.

2. Parse the access.log file every five minutes (which will probably
take five minutes once the file get big).

3. Grab a couple of numbers (Hit Ratio & Transferred KB) out of the
Cachemgr, compare those numbers to the previous numbers, and wa-la, I
would get something close to bytes saved.

Does anyone have any other ideas? Will it be possible to see this type
of information if a future Cachemgr?

-- 
Brandon Stirling
Computer Services
University of Idaho