Users online for mods/admins only

[Sharron]

We runa very busy board and the users online is in excess of 1,000 much of the time. This has an effect on performance and since the users online is not essential to members they don't need it so it's on of the things we are looking to remove from members.

However, the staff of the board do need it.

I can hide the display of the users online from members easily enough such that it shows only to mods and admins but of course the query still runs and so this offers no performance benefit.

So, I need to be able to set it so that the query to get the users online only actually runs when a mod or admin opens the forum index, and not run at all when a normal member opens the page which isn't a template job.

Anybody have any ideas where and how this would be acheived?