Disabling "Who's Online" Feature - What Really Happens?

[LanciaStratos]

An extremely high-traffic event will be taking place on my website and vB 3.8 forum later this month, and I want to ensure the site remains online and stable. One thing I'd like to do is completely disable the "Who's Online" functionality, as it appears to write to the database on every member's page view.

I have found the "Who's Online Enabled" setting in the Admin CP, but it doesn't appear to actually do anything. I'm guessing that's not normal behavior...?

Anyways, I don't want to just hide the "Who's Online" list, I want to be able to temporarily turn the feature off completely to reduce the load on my database server. Will that setting accomplish that, or do I need to make some changes to the software with a plugin or custom coding?

[kh99]

If the write you're talking about is the location for each user, then I think that happens at the same time the session table is updated with the last activity time, so you probably wouldn't save anything even if the location update could be turned off.

[LanciaStratos]

Oh, yes, I see.

What about the location / page being viewed by the user? Is that stored in the session table as well?

[kh99]

Originally Posted by LanciaStratos

What about the location / page being viewed by the user? Is that stored in the session table as well?

Yeah, the location/page is what I meant. Are you seeing another write that looks like it's just for the location? Maybe you're talking about something different.