Sessions and Databases

[darkvirus]

I'm building a community website and have a user table to store the user information.

I'm thinking sessions is the best way to keep users logged in as they move to other pages, i also want another small script just to say how many acctive users there are on the site, i think a seperate session table is what im looking for and then just count the number of rows in the table.

My question is how would i go about geting the database to delete any sessions that haven't been used in say the last 5 minutes automaticaly and also any general help/tutorials people have or know about on sessions would be useful.

[planetsim]

Firstly you can do this in one table.

i use a typically usertracking table like this

sessioncode|arrivetime|lastactive|currentfile

From there

sessioncode is the session name or PHPSESSID code etc.

arrivetime is when the session first started
Lastactive is what you will use to delete the session when not used for 5mins

current file, is just a thing i use if i want to display users on a page.

//deleting 5min old sessions that are not active.

function DelSession() {
  mysql_query("DELETE FROM tablename  WHERE lastactive <= '".time()."'");//assuming you are using time()
}

function UsersOnline() {
  $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tablename");
return mysql_num_rows($query);
}

Hope that helps you.