Tracking how many hours users spend on my website - php

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.

Answer 2

I would use ajax to get the clients to call the server ever minute or so. Just a to tell the server that the user is still watching that page.
The server would have a lastTimestamp and a totalTimeSpentOnSite in a database. The lastTimestamp would simply have the last time a ajax request or page load occurred.
Every time the ajax fires the server would calculate now - lastTimestamp and add that to the totalTimeSpentOnSite.
To make it even more accurate you could
add javascript listeners to onBlur() to record only the actual time spent with that window active and then send that time to the server instead of just telling the server that the user is still active.

Answer 3

My philosophy is this: don't be overly concerned with efficiency until it becomes a problem. Unless your site has really heavy traffic, you won't notice the four queries. This might be simpler, though:
Log every page load.
Every few hours, run a script through cron that calculates time
spent online for each user and updates a running total in the user
table.
Periodically clear out your access_log table.

Answer 4

Add it to your session management. When a user starts their session record their start time. When the user ends their session record their end time. Simple math from there will gather you the total amount of time they are spending per session on your site.
To answer Filip Haglund
yeah but you'll have to wait for the session to time out, and that time doesn't reflect the actual time the user spent on the last page before he/she closed it.
That's true but then again, all of the answers available so far work on the same basic premise:
Log the page load time.
Log when the user leaves
Update a database table
It just so happens that to log when the user leaves you need sessions. I don't know of any other way in PHP to keep track of user activities the way OP wants. Updating the database table is a technical matter. Do you wanna use a CRON job? Do you wanna use AJAX? Do you wanna do something else?
If you really wanted to know how much activity was actually occurring you could send off AJAX requests for certain JavaScript events. This will tie the time tracking to actual browser events. Of course this means your time tracking relies on JavaScript being enabled.

Answer 5

The "two minute" rule is a little unreliable - and you can get tied up trying to work out what "time spent" actually means.
In a previous project, we did the following.
On each page load, we checked if the user had a current session, and if not, created a GUID to identify the current session.
We wrote a log record to the database with the datetime, GUID, page URL, and user ID (if the user had logged in).
To calculate "time spent", we calculated the time difference between the first and last record for the session GUID, and added one minute to reflect the time spent on the last page.
This is not entirely accurate, but it can run realtime without the need for CRON for sites with moderate amounts of traffic.

Answer 6

first choose a duration beyond which a session is considered interrupted. (ex: 10 minutes)
log all page load with all ip in database
if time between 2 page load for one ip is more than duration don't add this time to the total time for this ip
if time between 2 page load for one ip is less than duration add this time to the total time for this ip
2 problem is :
- if user stay more than duration (10 minutes) in a page without refresh he's considered as disconnected.
- the last page duration is not saved
Piwik works like that

Answer 7

This is what i use and it checks updates the DB anytime the user loads any page.
The data is accurate, as it calculates if the user loads a page per minutes, if so, it adds the time difference to the DB.
$now= time();
$stmt = $db_con->prepare(" SELECT last_seen,time_online FROM user_online_log WHERE user_id=? limit ? ");
$stmt->execute(array( $user_id, 1));
$fetch= $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
$last_seen=$fetch['last_seen']; //integer value from db, saved from time() function
$last_seen_plus_one_min= $last_seen + 60;
if( $now < $last_seen_plus_one_min ){
$additional_time_online= $now - $last_seen; }
else{ $additional_time_online = 0; }
//update db
$stmt12 = $db_con->prepare(" update user_online_log set last_seen=?, time_online = time_online+? WHERE user_id=? limit 1 ");
$stmt12->execute(array($now, $additional_time_online, $user_id));