[Eug-lug] How many people are on my website?

[larry price]

On 8/15/06, Matthew Jarvis <mattj at bikefriday.com> wrote:
> I've always wanted to know the answer to this...
>
> If I'm running Apache on Linux, is there a way to find out how many
> people are currently considered "online" at the website?

HTTP is  a stateless protocol, there is no concept of session at the
level the web server deals with, you can build a session on top of
HTTP using cookies, or some other method where you are maintaining
state in the expectation that the connection will be refreshed within
a set time limit.

> Or would I have to make it harder by counting session id's or....

This only works if your session object isn't prone to spoofing,
doesn't fail when the client turns cookies off etc, etc.

your best options are

a. log file analyzers like the one kbob pointed you at, these vary considerably
webalizer is OK, awstats should be avoided, there are about ten dozen
out there each with strengths and weaknesses.

b. third party analytics

These usually take the form of a web bug, or piece of javascript that
you drop onto your web pages from which a third party derives
statistics on page views, conversions, affiliate conversions and so on
and makes them available to you.
Google supposedly has a very good free offering in this space, which I
have not used enough to judge. There are a number of commercial
offerings both free and for a fee.

http://www.google.com/search?q=web+analytics

These are what you want if you are doing anything commercial as they
can tease out patterns and derive information that just looking at
static web server logs can't. They are also usually more focused on
producing statistics on viewership reach and a/b testing in formats
which are useful to publishers rather than providing a summary of raw
data.