[ILUG] understanding apache process numbers

[Gareth Eason]

	It depends on the site, and their requirements for data-accuracy, etc.

	Most often there are two options - one is to assume that people will 
look at the page for at least (say) 30s, so any unique IPs within a 30s 
window are considered new viewers and are counted towards some kind of 
concurrent total.

	If it's a session based website (dynamically generated, often using PHP 
or Perl) then a (somewhat) more accurate count can be generated by 
seeing how many concurrent sessions are active. Though this is prone to 
users just leaving and the sessions timing out all by themselves too...

	There are other ways, but all fall mostly into the latter category of 
the 'lies, damn lies and statistics' trio :-)

	Best regards,
	-->Gar



Cian Cullinan wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 19:12:22 +0000, John Reilly <jr at inconspicuous.org> wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 14:13, Cian Cullinan wrote:
>>
>>>2) How can I tell how many people are currently viewing a web page (or
>>>even site)? Presumably once the page has loaded for them and they're
>>>just scrolling through it, not interacting, then there is no httpd
>>>process associated with them?
>>
>>Correct.
>>
> 
> 
> Ok so, makes sense, but how do people work out how many viewers are
> looking at their pages at a given time? Where are they getting their
> info when they say something like "we get up to 600 concurrent viewers
> at a given time"? Some sort of php voodoo?
> 
> Cian