error counting avtive sessions (article at devarticles.com)

Lotta

I’m trying to count currently active users on my page, without storing any visitors in my database. So I wonder if anyone has used this function I found at devarticles about how to count active sessions (http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/215/1), with good result, because it don’t seem to work for me.
There is an error in the code (missing an } ) so I’ll post the code here (corrected) if you’re not up to view that page.

/* Start the session */ 
session_start(); 

/* Define how long the maximum amount of time the session can be inactive. */ 
define("MAX_IDLE_TIME", 3); 

function getOnlineUsers(){ 

if ( $directory_handle = opendir( session_save_path() ) ) { 
$count = 0; 
while ( false !== ( $file = readdir( $directory_handle ) ) ) { 
if($file != '.' && $file != '..'){ 
// Comment the 'if(...){' and '}' lines if you get a significant amount of traffic 
if(time()- fileatime(session_save_path() . '\\' . $file) < MAX_IDLE_TIME * 60) { 
$count++; 
} 
} 
closedir($directory_handle); 

return $count; 
}

} else { 
return false; 
} 

} 

echo 'Number of online users: ' . getOnlineUsers() . '<br />';

You can change this line

if ($file != '.' && $file != '..')

if (is_file($file) )

if you like to.

The error I get is that my $file only contains a “.” , does anyone know what may be the error?
/Charlotte

rheroux

Try changing it to this and see what happens:


<?php

function getOnlineUsers()
{
$dir = session_save_path();
$handler = opendir($dir);
$count = 0;
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handler)))
{
	if($file == "." || $file == "..")
	{
	}
		else
		{
		$count++;
		}
}
return $count;
}

?>

Lotta

Hi rheroux,
Thank you very much for this resolution, it’s working great.

The only problem is that when a visitor closes the browser, the session is still there. I don’t know in which Session configuration options you’re able to change the lasting time of a session.
I thought I could use ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', seconds); but it don’t seems to work.
And the session.gc_maxlifetime is set to 1440 sec (24 min) by default, and my sessions are stored for at least 24 hours, after the browser is closed.

Do you know what to do?

rheroux

You could change your session.gc_probability to something higher than the default 1% if you want. That should clear things up a bit.

smerz

function getOnlineUsers(){

$dir = session_save_path();
$handler = opendir($dir);
$count = 0;
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handler))) {
     if($file == "." || $file == "..") {
     }
     else {
        // Comment the 'if(...){' and '}' lines if you get a significant amount of traffic
        $time = time();
        $filetime = fileatime(session_save_path() . '\\' . $file);
        $range = 180;
        if(($time - $filetime) < $range) {
            $count++;
        }
    }
}
return $count;

}

/ $range = 3 mins at the moment so it counts all users who accessed a site within 3 minutes 😛 /