Rails Track Online Users through Session

We recently needed to implement tracking which users are online at our site. Matt Beedle posted a good starting guide to how to do this, but I found that there were a possible improvements from his tutorial.

Like Matt, we’re using an ActiveRecord session store to track who’s online when. Unlike Matt, we wanted to keep track of when the user last accessed a page, and what page they accessed. The most SQL-efficient way I could find to do this was to add fields directly to the session model and update those. To add the fields to the model, I just created a migration that added the stuff I wanted to track:

add_column :sessions, :user_id, :integer
add_column :sessions, :last_url_visited, :string

Next, I created a before_filter in our application to update these as the user moved through the site, like so:

session.model.update_attribute(:user_id, session[:user_id])
session.model.update_attribute(:last_url_visited, request.url)

With these properties getting updated, all that remained was to write a query to figure out who’s been moving around the site recently. This ended up being as simple as:

online_sessions = CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.find( :all,
:select => "user_id, last_url_visited",
:conditions => [ "updated_at > ? and user_id is not null", Time.now() - 30.minutes ],
:limit => 50 )


And that was about it. The tracking is just one SQL UPDATE a pop, and the session find doesn’t need any fancy joins and such, so it ought to scale pretty well.