How many visitors are online.

Is there a Script that says "X many visitors are online" on my site?

[uhwebs]

I have sometimes seen something on a site like, "X many people online". I am wondering how I can get something like that for my site? A script that tells how many people are browsing your site at any given time?

[blue_eagle]

search for online visit counter you should be able to come up with many php scripts

[celgins]

If you're running a dynamically driven site (ASP, PHP), you should probably use session variables to calculate the number of users currently using your site.

For example in ASP, you would use the "Session_OnStart" and "Session_OnEnd" functions in your global.asa file.

[krod]

If you use phpbb software, you can integrate the 'whos online' in your main website.

[Matt Probert]

In Perl, on a Linux server try (within a full program):

open(FILE,"netstat -na ¦ grep ^tcp ¦ wc -l ¦");

while(<FILE>)
{
print "SYSTEM STATUS:<br>$_ users online";
}
close(FILE);

This will return the number of currently open sessions (that will include AOL users where they open numerous sessions to access images), but it's close enough!

Matt

[MichaelBluejay]

Of course, unless I'm mistaken, the most you can know about a user's status is the last time they requested a page. Once the page has been delivered to the user's browser there's no telling whether they leave immediately or spend the next hour contemplating the page they just got. At some point you have to decide how old a page request counts as an "active" user. (5 minutes? 30 minutes?)

[zCat]

netstat -na ¦ grep ^tcp

This shows the number of TCP connections active, it will not neccessarily correspond to a meaningful number of "site users" from the output. Depending on the system it will also include TCP connections to databases, proxy servers, SSH sessions etc.

You could parse the output to extract only HTTP sessions, possibly with a particular state (ESTABLISHED?), which might give a reasonable ballpark figure. Or it might not, depending on how you define "visitor" (e.g. the figure would include any bots).