[hamid]

hi circleofatlantis

Each time a user opens a new window, they will be assigned a new sessionid.

So, say a user is on your home page and clicks one of your categories to open in a new window - they will now appear twice in your Users Online. So the more windows they open, the more times they will appear in your Users Online.

Each session remains active for 1 hour by default.

Obviously different people surf in different ways - some people always open up links in new windows - but you will find that most people keep to one session.

In my experience, I have found that if you see many many instances of the same IP appearing multiple times, it's usually a spider (or other automated bot creature) indexing your site - but its badly written - ie. it hasn't been configured to keep the same session.

I usually watch out for these as they can open hundreds of connections in a short amount of time which leads to an unneccesary heavy load on the server.

When I spot these, I run a quick check to see where the ip originates from and then add a 'deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' in my .htaccess file to stop it in its tracks.

There probably is a way of modifying the code to filter multiple instances of each ip address, but I have found that the original code is just too useful in its present form.