Django: Using Caching to Track Online Users

Recently I wanted a simple solution to track whether a user is online on a given Django site.  The definition of "online" on a site is kind of ambiguous, so I'll define that a user is considered to be online if they have made any request to the site in the last five minutes.

I found that one approach is to use Django's caching framework to track when a user last accessed the site.  For example, upon each request, I can have a middleware set the current time as a cache value associated with a given user.  This allows us to store some basic information about logged-in user's online state without having to hit the database on each request and easily retrieve it by accessing the cache.

My approach below.  Comments welcome.

In settings.py:

# add the middleware that you are about to create to settings
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ....
    'middleware.activeuser_middleware.ActiveUserMiddleware',
    ....
)

# Setup caching per Django docs. In actuality, you'd probably use memcached instead of local memory.
CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
        'LOCATION': 'default-cache'
    }
}

# Number of seconds of inactivity before a user is marked offline
USER_ONLINE_TIMEOUT = 300

# Number of seconds that we will keep track of inactive users for before 
# their last seen is removed from the cache
USER_LASTSEEN_TIMEOUT = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7

In activeuser_middleware.py:

import datetime
from django.core.cache import cache
from django.conf import settings

class ActiveUserMiddleware:

    def process_request(self, request):
        current_user = request.user
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            now = datetime.datetime.now()
            cache.set('seen_%s' % (current_user.username), now, 
                           settings.USER_LASTSEEN_TIMEOUT)

In your UserProfile module or some other model associated with the user:

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    ....
    ....

    def last_seen(self):
        return cache.get('seen_%s' % self.user.username)

    def online(self):
        if self.last_seen():
            now = datetime.datetime.now()
            if now > self.last_seen() + datetime.timedelta(
                         seconds=settings.USER_ONLINE_TIMEOUT):
                return False
            else:
                return True
        else:
            return False

Then in the template where you want to display whether the user is online or not:

{% with request.user.get_profile as profile %}

 <table>
   <tr><th>Last Seen</th><td>{% if profile.last_seen %}{{ profile.last_seen|timesince }}{% else %}awhile{% endif %} ago</td></tr>
   <tr><th>Online</th><td>{{ profile.online }}</td></tr>
 </table>

{% endwith %}

Pros:
 - Simple solution
 - Doesn't need to hit the database for saving the timestamp each request

Cons:
  - Last user access times are cleared if the server is rebooted or cache is reset
  - Last user access times are accessible only as long as they exist in the cache.