Question

I am playing with phpwebsocket. Is there a way to have only one user connected at a time?

If a second user tries to connect they should be automatically disconnected and if the first user is idle for a given amount of time he should be disconnected to allow space for a new user.

Is this possible – and if so, does anyone know how?

Answer 1

It’s possible to limit usercount to one user, of course. You have to look at usercount and decide to accept or not new connections. In code it looks like this:

if($socket==$master){
  $client=socket_accept($master);
  if($client<0){ console("socket_accept() failed"); continue; }
  else{ connect($client); }
}

You can make a further if statement to check, if usercount is 0, so you accept connection:

if($socket==$master){
  if(count($users) == 0){
    $client=socket_accept($master);
    if($client<0){ console("socket_accept() failed"); continue; }
    else{ connect($client); }
  }
}

To disconnect a silent user, i would refresh timestamp of user evertime the user sends a message to server. Now the only thing to do is to check, if diffence between users timestamp and current time is higher then your disconnect time. If so, kick him 🙂