How about something like this? You want to avoid having to parse the whole log to find an instant in time, but you don't want to save all the instants in time that you could possibly need.

A compromise would be to have a process that follows the log (or parses it from the start), saving checkpoints once in a while. So say, once a day, the process says that "Right now, the following 12 people are online, and they logged on at the corresponding times: ...report...".

Then, when you want to find a specific interval, you only need to parse from the preceeding checkpoint, until the end of the interval. Depending on how frequently you checkpoint, this could be very simple.

-- Dan

In reply to (z) Re: How to do session times The Right Way by zigdon
in thread How to do session times The Right Way by strider corinth

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