Counting users that are logged in

andyhough

I have developed a site where users need to login top use an online database tool. I currently count the number of users online using a session count but this is proving to be unreliable as it also counts people who just visit the page. Does anyone have a good quick n' easy solution to count how many users are logged into the site at that time??

This is the current function i am using to count visitors:

function getUsersOnline() {
$count = 0;

$handle = opendir(session_save_path());
if ($handle == false) return -1;

while (($file = readdir($handle)) != false)
{
    if (ereg("^sess", $file)) $count++;
}
closedir($handle);

return $count;

}

Like i said, this counts every session including the ones where people have not logged in. I need something just to count logged in users

thanks

andy

bastien

is to create a boolean field in the db 'loggedIn' and update that when the user logs in...then just count...you will have to account for people who do not log out properly (via some kind of logout button or link) by maybe expiring their session in 10 minutes or something like that

andyhough

Thanks for the suggestion. The only problem is i am not sure how to do this 🙁. Could anyone help with this one? I know i need to create a new table and then increment the number each time someone logs in but i am not sure how i would decrement these numbers.

Plus i am not sure on the script for it.

Could anyone help here or have any other good methods of doing this?

bastien

for those people that log in

if login succesfull{
session['log']=+1
}

the hard part no matter which way you do it, is the decrement of the counter when the user doesn't log out properly...

see here for session_cache_expire on the server side, you should be able to work this as a trigger to reduce the session counter for those people that don't log in
from that page...

if(!isset($_SESSION)) session_start();
$expire=606024752; # sec, min, hours, days, weeks ?

Client

setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time()+$expire, "/");
....

Server

session_cache_expire($expire);

hth