Current amount of users online?

[strobic]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to code a page which displays the amount of users currently viewing a page. But how do I decrease the count if a user closes the page?

 

Thanks

[arbitter]

Perhaps if you give us the code you use when the amount increases, because now we haven't got a clue so it's quite hard to help.

[revraz]

You can't really.  But you can log the time they view the page and display say the last 3 minutes.

[mofm]

Yhe i agree with above your best bet is  to make page views time out ... this will make inaccuracy's but will still work .. could this be done with ajax ?? im assumption  is that it can but im no java-script expert

[the182guy]

No AJAX needed, just setup your system to store PHP sessions in the database, this will mean that you have a sessions tabe and there will be a field for the timestamp of the last request. All you need to do is run a query to pull out the number of sessions (rows) that have a timestamp in the last say 10 minutes.

 

There is a way to increase the accuracy with AJAX, which is to (within your page) call one of your scripts every say 1 minute, which will update the session timestamp, then of course if a user closes the page, the AJAX call will no longer run and the timeout won't be updated, so you can assume the user is not online if the timeout is older than a minute.

 

Personally I won't bother with the AJAX though, I would just look at the table and see who was updated in the last 10 minutes.