Live hit counter. php?

blue928

Hello. I am starting to see webpages that have a "live hit counter" that is to say that they are numerically showing how many people are currently looking at their website. Is there anyway to do this in php? if not, how is this done and what language is used?

thx
blue

Anon

I've been trying to puzzle that one out too ever since I saw it on the phpnuke.org site.

I didn't exactly know what language it was, (or how accurate it was for that matter) until I downloaded the PHP-Nuke system and uploaded it on a test site.

Sure enough, when I went to my test site it had 1 listed online "guest" - Me. Now, curiosity piqued, I logged in from another machine while leaving orignal connection open. Yup. It had 2 listed online guests.

I tried deciphering the PHP-Nuke to figure out how the heck it knew and the best I could come out of it with (besides a frigging headache🙂) was that maybe it was grabbing IP's when the page loaded and storing it in the db. I have no idea how it knew when I closed the page though cuz it knocked me down to 1 online guest when I checked the other machine.

yelvington

Nuke uses cookies and timeouts to "guess" how many users are "looking" at a site. The concept is not meaningful in HTTP, and the answer is never "right," but some people find it entertaining.

blue928

Steve made an interesting point. Cookies would be ideal (or sessions since everyone doesn't accept cookies). setting a cookie when someone accesses your site and then deleting it when the browser closed or the person left via another link would be easy to do. However, how do you count the number of cookies that have been opened as a result of looking at your site? where is that data stored?

blue

blue928

another thought... setting the cookie would be simple.. here is a theory that incorporates a database:

if ($cookie)
//"insert random unique id into database" then u would just count the number of random ids and display that.

BUT! how can you tell when a person has closed their browser? how MY server tell when the cookie has been deleted from THEIR computer?

... another thought
if you use sessions and pass them in the URL then those sessions are stored on the server computer, right? okay, how can you tell when taht session is over? (ie, the browser is closed, or, they left the website)

... final thought..
couldn't you just use FSOCKOPEN() and open a connection to port 80 and count the currenct connections?

thx
blue

kparker

BUT! how can you tell when a person has closed their browser?

You can't. That's why Steve mentioned timeouts: you simply
update the random-key record every time the user loads another
page, and then you have a reaper process that looks for expired
entries and deletes them. The reaper can either run from a cron
job, or else it can be triggered by the same page load that adds
the user to the database in the first place.

ahawks

This is easy, in Java.
Write an applet that connects to your server. You can have it insert some tracking info into a DB if you like. Keep the socket open while the applet is loaded. when the users closes the page (thus unloading the applet), it closes the connection and the user count goes down by 1.

while it is connected, we use the open socket to keep a live update of a count of users connected to your server.