PHP Session expire event

Question

I am trying to make some changes to an opensource project. I want to keep track of when users log in and log out. Right now I change their login status in db when they logi

Answer 1

I did something really nasty once. Every time a session was "updated" by a page refresh / fetch / etc., I updated a timestamp on a DB row. A second daemon polled the DB every 10 minutes and performed "clean-up" operations.

You won't find any native PHP facilities to achieve your goal. Session timeout doesn't run in the background. You won't even know if a session is timed out, unless a timed out session attempts another access. At this point, nearly impossible to trap, you can make your determination and handle it appropriately.

I'd recommend a queue & poll architecture for this problem. It's easy and will definitely work. Add memcached if you have concerns about transaction performance.