Real time visitor count widget - how does it work?

Hello,

I’m wondering how the figures displayed on the real time visitor count are computed because I think that I get mistaken values.

On my widget, I have value like 20 visits, then 5 seconds after 60 visits and 5 seconds after 19 visits.
It seems unlikely that 40 visitors quit the website together. Then 41 new visits started together.
I also have a high value for actions like 3000 actions for 20 visits, so 150 actions/visits within 3 minutes :S

How should I interpret these results ? Is there any configuration to do ?

Thanks for any tips :slight_smile:

No tip ? :frowning:

I googled and I saw this: New dashboard widget to show real-time visitor count · Issue #3131 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub which said that the widget will work like this: it shows the users which have send an request within the last X seconds by sending an update request every X seconds or so to tell the server that the user is still online.

Then, I went to the ticket Support Ping requests to report a better 'time on page' · Issue #2041 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub for the ping requests. I saw that the feature will be included in the version 2.0.

So, the real time visitor count widget is not reliable for now in version 1.12, the version I’m using. Am I right ?

No tip ? :s

I read this New dashboard widget to show real-time visitor count · Issue #3131 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub which said that the wanted behaviour is to send an update request every X seconds to tell the server that the user is still online. Then, the graph shows the users which have send an request within the last X seconds.

And for the support of ping request (Support Ping requests to report a better 'time on page' · Issue #2041 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub), it seems to be included only in the version 2.0.

So, the widget “real-time visitor count” is not reliable yes, am I right ?

I’m using the version 1.12.