How many online...

ashley526

I have searched this site, and I found many topics that were sorta what I needed but not really. I want a script that can tell how many people are online my site at any givin time. I don't need it to be as difficult as what others need. I don't need to know where they are from, what their ip's are, or anything else, just the # of people online my site at that time.

I know that it runs off of asp but I have a linux based server and it doesn't come with it. (or the support)

So I was wondering if anyone knew another way of doing this?

thanks so much!!!!

ashley

Weedpacket

Well, you do need to be able to tell people apart (using their IPs, for example), otherwise you can't count them properly.

MarkR

Give each session a unique ID - if you're not already using sessions (which does this anyway).

Write them into a file / database (If using a file, make sure it's locked correctly otherwise race conditions could cause corruption).

Assume that anybody who hasn't hit a PHP page for 5 minutes or so has gone away.

So display or count all the ones who have hit a page in the last 5 minutes.

Somewhere you should also delete the old sessions from this table so it doesn't become excessively large.

Mark

Weedpacket

Originally posted by MarkR
Give each session a unique ID - if you're not already using sessions (which does this anyway).

Write them into a file / database (If using a file, make sure it's locked correctly otherwise race conditions could cause corruption).

Assume that anybody who hasn't hit a PHP page for 5 minutes or so has gone away.

So display or count all the ones who have hit a page in the last 5 minutes.

Somewhere you should also delete the old sessions from this table so it doesn't become excessively large.

Mark

This pretty much sums up the other suggestions that have been given for approaching this task. They might seem like overkill, ashley526, but it's really about as simple as you can get.