PHP keeping track of how many online rooms exist [closed]

Question

I'm making an online card game project but now I have a minor issue:

In my game there are rooms that users can join. How do I find out how many created rooms there are? I thought about using a static counter but it didn't work. (I thing that the reason it didn't work is because every process is run on a separated thread so using static keyword wont help me solve this problem.) Also I thought about saving it to the database but than when someone cancels a room, for others, it wont be visible.

Do you know any solution how to do this?

Answer 1

If it's just a handful of rooms, I'd use a flat file, otherwise you'll need to post some code of what you tried using a database... This should be a very simple request.

Here's a flat file solution. Save this as a file on your server and call it with ?do=add or ?do=sub to add or subtract the count respectively. If you don't specify do then it will print the current number-

<?php
if($_GET['do']=="add"){
    $new = intval(@file_get_contents("count.txt"))+1;
    $fp = fopen("count.txt", "w");
    fwrite($fp, $new);
    fclose($fp);
}else
if($_GET['do']=="sub"{
    $new = intval(@file_get_contents("count.txt"))-1;
    if($new < 0){$new = 0;}
    $fp = fopen("count.txt", "w");
    fwrite($fp, $new);
    fclose($fp);
    }else{
    print @file_get_contents("count.txt");
}

?>