I'll assume we're talking about a web session, so there are no log off times. I'll also assume your logs contain a unique session ID for each user. All you have to do is choose the interval you want (say 10 minutes), and then count the number of unique users accessing the site during the 10 minutes starting at 13:02:56. This is about as close as you can come, given that there are no log offs.

As for how to make the parsing efficient, I suspect it will be fast enough for most situations to just start at the beginning and go forward until you hit that time, but you could also use a binary search algorithm. This is sorted data, so you can take advantage of that.


In reply to Re: How to do session times The Right Way by perrin
in thread How to do session times The Right Way by strider corinth

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.