Sessions problem, +250gb in /var/lib/php/session
 

Hi guys, I have a big problem with my vBulletin Forum 3.8. My dedicated server is going very slow since a few months ago, and the problem is in the hard drives (RAID 2x2 TB), they are working aaaaall time writing in /var/lib/php/session, with more than 250 gb stored here!!!

I´ve got some products installed like Automatic Thread Tagger, IFRAMEr by BOP5 (FREE Version), Per Forum Edit Time Limit, PhotoPost vBGallery, Post Thank You Hack, Quick Editor Improver, vBSEO, vbStopForumSpam, Word Links FREE by BOP5 VB3, DragonByte Tech: Advanced User Tagging (Lite)...

I can´t find where is the problem, seems like sessions are never deleted and are stored forever, any idea???

Thanks!!

Go to Scheduled Tasks > Scheduled Task Manager and check to see if your Hourly Cleanup and Hourly Cleanup 2 tasks are running. You could run one of them manually and see if it fixes the problem, and if so it means they aren't running like they should.

Also check to see what you have set for Session Timeout under "Cookies and HTTP Header Options" in the options (The default is 900). If you have that set really high then it might cause the problem you described.

Thanks for the reply. Hourly Cleanup and Hourly Cleanup 2 are working fine, every hour each one.


Session Timeout was 1500 one week ago, then I changed it to 900 as default, but problem persist.

This - /var/lib/php/session - is not a directory that vB writes to. vB writes to a session TABLE in your database, but those are not directories. The session table would be a session.frm file. Is that what you are talking about?

Oh, right. I wasn't paying attention and I was thinking of the session table.

No, there are millions of files in /var/lib/php/session and we don?t know where are they coming from. session.frm file is fine, all the problem is that there someting that is making hard drives work all time, fullin the php/session carpet.

vBulletin doesn't use PHP sessions, except in the case of Facebook, but that is facebooks code.

Are you using Facebook connect?

No, no facebook connect.

We have our own bridge between Web session (todocircuito.com) and Forum session (todocircuito.com/foro).

Thanks.

That sounds like a custom coding problem.

Thanks all, we found the problem. 2 chinese search engines have been making thousands of searchs las weeks, colapsing the server. 98% of the ip's in sessions carpet logs were from China.

We have blocked those chinese search engines and server load is now under 10% (before was always 50% Or more)