The Last Visit™ module relies on traffic on your website to initiate the Last Visit™ processing job. So, if your website receives very little traffic the processing job schedule may not work like clockwork. For example, if a processing job is scheduled in 3 hours, but there is no traffic on the website for 4 hours, the processing job would not run until that time.

There are 3 files in the root PHP-Nuke directory which control the Last Visit™ processing job. These files are listed below with a description of what each file does.

1. lastvisit-job-image.php - This is a fake image which causes the next file to execute without actually loading it into the webpage. Each time the image file is loaded it runs the next file in the background on your server. This method helps keep your page's load-time to a minimum.
   
   
2. lastvisit-job.inc.php - Executed by the image file, this file checks when the last processing job was performed, calculates when the next job is scheduled, detects if a job is currently active, and executes the processing job when it's scheduled if there is not a job currently running.
   
   
3. lastvisit_job.php - This file will perform the processing of membership activity status, email notifications, marking of inactive accounts, termination of inactive accounts, pruning/retaining of forum posts and private messages, synchronization of databases, and logging it's own progress.

Last Visit™ utilizes what I call a "hand-off" method for processing information. This method allows you to set the maximum number of accounts to process with each processing job. Memberships which are not processed during one job will be handed-off to the next scheduled job. This is a big server resource saver! The processing of information requires the use of server resources, so it is important to keep that in mind as you are adjusting your Last Visit™ settings. It is also important to be aware that it may take several processing jobs to get completely through the entire database. For example, if you have 1,000 members and you set Last Visit™ to process a maximum of 100 members per job, it will take 10 processing jobs to process all members in the database. It is not a good idea to process 50,000 members every 10 minutes. This could make your host very angry.

To get an even better idea as to how the Last Visit™ job works, go to the Last Visit™ settings panel and click on the Debug Job Files button.