online/offline status display

eriksmoen

I was wondering if anyone knew a simple way to create an online/offline status display for a website. If anyone knows of a unix tool that can display just the number of users accessing data from the server, that would be great... being that i could just use that number (thus showing activity on FTP, SSH, WEB, etc...). Otherwise, if anyone knows of a better way, please let me know. If not the app, I'd like to be able to implement it into mySQL database somehow. ... Suppose I could just use javascript and switch user to offline status when the close the window/or leave the site. I don't know... If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

dalecosp

I suppose the classic unix tool would be users(1), who(1) or finger(1).

You might:

<?php
$data=shell_exec('users');
$num=count(explode(" ", $data));
echo "there are ".$num . " users on the site right now...";

?>

HTH,

dalecosp

Of course, I just realized that that won't do squat to get a number of http/web users. I don't know what would be best for that. You might execute "top | grep http" and subtract 2, but that'd be unrealistic --- you'd probably have a lot of child processes up all the time --- plus, what if it's a shared host?

You might have to use some kind of cookie, ordered serially, that the script could count. I imagine that this board and most like it enter a count into the db for each login/logout, and do it that way.

Wish I could be more help....

Jeb_

I'd suggest the sessions idea dalescop mentioned. Store the sessions in the database, timing them out every so often (delete all older than, say, 5 minutes). It won't be a constantly accurate number, but at least it'll be roughly correct.