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Could be people clicked on the wrong link or realise this site isnt what there looking for and close the window straight away.

Counting active users is never acurate as HTTP is a state less prorotocol, so it is impossible to keep track of such things.

How the active users counters works is by counting sessions. Each time a user comes to the site a session is started for that user.

The problem then is if a user has cookies disbled a new session is started for each HTTP request. Each page is then 1 HTTP request, but then each image on the page is another HTTP request.

This means that if a visitor has cookies disabled and there are 20 images on a page 21 sessions will be created for that user.

Sessions usully last for 20 minutes so this can quickly mount up.

This isn't a bug more a work around with the way HTTP works as being able to workout who is connected is never going to be accurate unless HTTP is changed to a connection orinated protocol.

Not unless you want to add a hell of allot of overhead to the site and even then it won't be accurate.

If you do a little research on how HTTP works then you will see how difficult it is to detemine if a user is online or not.

HTTP being a stateless protocol means that a connection is only established during the time that that page, image, etc. is downloading to the calling browser, once the page, image, etc. has finshed being sent  the connection is dropped.

There is no way of tracking users using HTTP except work arounds like cookies, but cookies are disabled there is no way of tracking the user. The IP address could also change for each connection, that means you could have over HTTP connections from one user for one page as each image, link file (CSS, JS, etc) would require a new HTTP connection to the server.


Edited by -boRg-

for each request of document a new HTTP session is opened.. and also browsers usualy many simeltaneous HTTP connection to websites which range usualy between 3 - 10 so average each visitor has 3 or more connection in normal conditions...