Maintaining sessions

[Anon]

Hi

I am building a site for a virtual airline and I want to build a whose online feature.

I sort of understand the concept about saving the sessions to a table, but thats okay for arrivals and moving about within the site.

But my problem is how do you work out when aomeone leaves, yes you can code all your out links but that doesn't help when someone wanders off.

The only system I can think of is something along the lines of everytime a script is activated by a user it checks the active users somehow and if the time since their last activation is say more than 10 minutes they are removed from being on the site.

Is there a better way????

DC

[Anon]

I would think the best way for this is to create a database session routine where you can manage a user's session as they browse your site. Also, this gives you better capabilites for clean up. If you check the wrox site, I think they have sample codes for database session management routines.

Hope this help!

[Anon]

sessions are maintained even if the user leaves the site. The only session killer is if he/she closes the browser window. So you don't have anything to worry about.

-S

[[deleted]]

Closing the browser does not kill the session. Only session_destroy and the garbage cleaner can kill sessions.

When you close the browser and the cookies are set to expire when the browser is closed, then you just loose the sessionid and you can't access the session anymore, but the session is still alive on the server.

[[deleted]]

The only way of knowing if a person is browsing your site is by the hits he's making.

So the method you propose is quite common; keep a record of the users through their sessionid, and with every hit you update a database table to store the date of that hit.
Every X seconds you check the table and all the sessionid's that have a date of less than X minutes ago are active, the rest has not visited the site for X minutes and can be considered 'inactive'.

[Anon]

Ah... i see.

So then how often are un-"used" sessions cleaned up?

-S

[[deleted]]

Read the session section in your PHP manual about the "garbage cleaner".

[haji_hill]

This is definitely the way to go, track your user's using Postgres/MySQL and also, don't use sessions, use encrypted cookies, sessions are unreliable and dynamic IP's will mess up your whole system.

Good Luck, Cheers,
-Haji

[Anon]

Encrypted cookies!!! Has a nice ring to it. :-)

Allen