Question

I am writing a usersystem and as a statistic available for all my users I want to be able to provide them with the amount of hours they’ve been active on my website.

my original idea as to how to do this was:
user loads a page, and a record for the user is stored in a SQL table called accessLog
*user loads another page, sql query runs to see when they last visited a page*
if the user visited a page within the past two minutes, update their user account and add the time spent online
*insert a new record into accessLog*

however this would mean adding a potential of 4 additional queries to every single page of my website, which seems slow. I was thinking, there has got to be a more efficient way of tracking user activity online that I’m clearly too stupid to see!

Answer 1

My way of doing this is simple:

• When a user loads a page, their “last page load time” is updated in the database.
• A cron script runs every minute. It looks for users whose “last page load time” was in the last minute.
• Increment the “time spent on site” for each user found.

In this way, I can keep track of users accurately to the minute. Just divide by 60 to get the hours.