Best way to count logged on visitors? php5/session/objects

[trevors]

Anyone know? do i really need to create a new table which will store logged on members?
I would appreciate if someone had a better way.


Best Regards
Trevors

[evertcollab]

That way worked for me..

I overrided the default session handlers to work from a mysql tabel. So this is the place where all my sessions are stored..

Evert

[siteguru]

I typically use a table to store logged on users. I update this table with the timestamp on their every page load. I also run a universal garbage collection script to log out inactive users whose timestamp is greater than, say, 20 minutes old. This kills old sessions and help maintain an accurate count of logged on users.

[evertcollab]

That's also how I did it.

if made a small script that generates a random number between 1 and 100, if the number is 1 it will start garbage collecting. If your usercount is low you might want to reduce that value..

This method has worked pretty well for me (and you don't need CRON)

Evert

[bokehman]

20 minutes old.

Whoever heard of someone looking at a webpage for 20 minutes?

[evertcollab]

I guess that was a more general system, for a management app i would want a longer timeout