PHP - Visitors Online Counter

Question

I have the following code to count visitors on my PHP site. It works fine on my local development machine using WampServer but when I uploaded my files to my hosting account for

Answer 1

If you want your own internal counting system then I would suggest, storing such information related to website in database. And update the record everytime a user browses the website.

Answer 2

The best (free) way to count visitors is here: http://www.google.com/analytics.

If you want more realtime data, (for instance, currently active users) try: http://www.woopra.com/

If you're set on maintaining who is active on your site with your own code, I'd do so with a "last action" date field in your database on the users table. You will be able to do a PHP equivalent query to SELECT COUNT(id) FROM Users WHERE #{Time.now} > #{15.minutes.ago}

If you want to track anonymous users as well, rather than using the Users table, make a table with the visitor's IP as the identifying field and use the same technique mentioned above.

Answer 3

If the problem on the production server is that sessions are simply never deleted, you have two options:

• Lower the session expiry time on your PHP installation.
• Examine the last-modified date of the session files and only count them towards your total if they were modified within a certain amount of time from now.

Answer 4

Hmm, I'm not sure that reading the session files in the session dir is the best method.

Why not have a write on a db table for every page load. Then have a read that counts the number of unique users in the last x minutes?

It sounds db intensive but unless your site is ultra-busy, I can't see a problem.

Answer 5

If this is shared hosting, you're counting everyone's session files, not just your own. That's why the number is huge and largely unrelated to how many people are on your site.