How to get active visitors count at this moment on this page?

Question

I have a chat room and I want to show how many people are online exactly in this chat at this moment. User can join room with or without registation.

For example by counting unique IP adresses or counting active sessions — Nils, Feb 05 '17 at 14:19
@Nils IPs aren't people and can't reliably count/identify people. — chris85, Feb 05 '17 at 14:19

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '17 at 14:21

1

This is strongly dependant on the way you implement the chat room. You could assign a chat-session id and timeout to each visitor, which gets expired over time and removed from a list. This list will contain details on visitors, including the count.

answered Feb 05 '17 at 14:21

Rilke Petrosky

1,155
9
12

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

Just a quick idea that has come to my mind (can be heavily customized and improved):

1) Call a PHP script periodically (for instance, once per a minute) through an AJAX call with a unique per-user ID. Like this, for example:

var visitorCounter = function() {
    $.get('audience_checker.php', {
      id: get_random_id() // inspiration below 
    });
}

setInterval(visitorCounter, 60000); // it gets called every 60000 ms = 1 minute

Take an inspiration how to build a random ID generation here. Or use the IP address.

2) Now write the PHP script that will store IDs from $_GET super-global variable in a database, with timestamp. If the ID already exists, just update the timestamp.

3) And finally, another script statistics.php can just select those data from the database which are not older than a minute bases on the timestamp.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 05 '17 at 23:12

Of course will depend on your chat application logic but that's something I am using to count the users in my application. It is not perfect because you never know about your users if they don't log off. You can add a new table to handle sessions:

`id`, `expire`, `data`, `user_id`, `last_write`

then change the configuration to save the sessions into this table instead of files.

        'session' => [
        'class' => 'yii\web\DbSession',
        'writeCallback' => function ($session) {
            return [
                'user_id' => Yii::$app->user->id,
                'last_write' => time(),
            ];
        },
    ],

then you can check the sessions in the last 5 minutes for instance

Hope it helps

How to get active visitors count at this moment on this page?

3 Answers3