Active Users and Access

I personally would not risk it as all with Access as it just can't cope with the content updates. All it takes is two people updating the database at the same time a your database will become corrupted crashing the entire forum.

Your database will also grow to a larger size than it should be.

I'm planning on looking into using a different way of doing the active users using Application variables to store the details rather than a database so that Access users will be able to use this feature.

I agree with -boRg- in his assessment that the Active Users function places extra stress on an Access database and increases the chance for a database corruption and also increases the database filesize more than if the feature is turned off.

That being said, I have had a forum running on Access with the Active Users function turned on for about 7 months now without a problem. There are just over 80 members, during the day there may be 15-20 concurrent users, and they have posted almost 50,000 posts so far.

I purge older posts from the database periodically, trying to keep the post count at about 10,000 posts, and I compact the database once every week or so. My host does a nightly backup, so if anything catastrophic happens I can restore if need be.

thermonuke wrote: How much of a risk do i take in corrupting the Access database with "Active Users" activated with a small member load, around 5 on at any time. Your promtp response is appreciated.

I enabled it and in less than a day ... it crashed.

-boRg- wrote: I'm planning on looking into using a different way of doing the active users using Application variables to store the details rather than a database so that Access users will be able to use this feature.

This is very happy news. The one drawback I could ever say of WebWiz is the limitations of this function for Access users. Perl and php forums have seemingly no problems with this feature, across server platforms.

Not to pry, but have you had any progress on it so far ... ? (as you can tell, I'm dying to have this feature work) If so, ball park time before it's finished?

Could the active users information be stored in another database file?  That way if the active users crashed, it wouldn't bring down the rest of the site.  But then again, active users would be prone to crashing.  So I guess that's not a solution either.

I am so glad I am using the SQL version.