Question

Hello in a PHP Script i have the following MySQL Query

$query_players = "SELECT (current_timestamp -`Online_since`) AS `Since` FROM `streams` WHERE `Team` = $temp AND `Online` = 1 ORDER BY `Viewers` DESC";

then i have:

$since = round($obj_players->Since /3600);

As you probably can imagine $since should contain how long the player is already online in hours. Strangely it has wrong results. Its like the time goes faster in MySQL 😛
For example after about 15 minutes it already shows “Online since 1 hour” another approximately 30 mins later it already shows 2 hours and so on.

Anyone know what could be wrong? Maybe current_timestamps is the problem?

Answer 1

current_timestamp is not really measured in seconds. So dividing the difference by 3600 doesn’t yield hours, but some arbitrary value.

The difference after 18 minutes is 1800 and round(1800/3600) = round(0.5) gives of course 1.

Depending on your real column type use either timediff() or timestampdiff() for your calculation.