Hiding the list of members online

[Spinball]

Hi,
for a busy forum, the active user list is too long. And IMO it looks amateurish, anyway.
I want to display the number of users online, but remove the list of logged in members.
I know editing the FORUMHOME template would allow me to hide the active user list.
But I'm concerned that I might then be having an unnecessary database query.
Does the current $activeusers code in the index.php also get the number of logged in users? I'm guessing it does, though after 20 years of programming experience it still looks gobbldeygook to me!
So I'm thinking that I will need to have some query in there, but my SQL experience tells me that doing a SELECT COUNT will be easier on the database than SELECTing all the looged in users.
Can anyone help with a hack here, please?
Thanks.