Question

how to get currently logged users in my website. I have a mysql table for maintain users.

I don’t know how to display names who are logged in.

Answer 1

Don’t use a isOnline field as others suggested. Instead use a lastSeen field. You can put a timestamp in that field and update it either on every page view.

If you want to go easy on your system, you can update every couple of minutes (with a variable $lastUpdate in the user session containing the timestamp of the last update of lastSeen).

To find “online” users, you can select all the users that were lastSeen in the last X minutes, for instance 10 minutes.

You can’t know an exact number of online users, because you can’t know if an user is looking at your page or he/she has already closed it. Anyway, a solution like this one is a good approximation.

Every hour or every day, depending on how many visitors you have, you can run a process to delete old entries.