Comments on: Shrink Your Drupal Sessions Table

By: krausdog

krausdog — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:31:12 +0000

Above you write:
ini_set(‘session.cache_expire’, 2700); // this is in minutes and so = just under 2 days
ini_set(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’, 2700); // this is in seconds and so = 45 mins
And then you write: sessions are only saved for 45 minutes. Thought readers should realize the differences between ‘expire’ and ‘gc_maxlifetime’

By: Mike DeWolfe

Mike DeWolfe — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:15:29 +0000

Mike DeWolfe said:

Hello Randy,
Great tips. Our session table is also a runaway. Heavy hitter like the Google spiders do the most damage. The two of them are responsible for over 100,000 records. With each hit, they spawn a new session and rack them up with lightning speed.

Great site, BTW, Randy.

- Mike

After some more digging, we found our core problem: Debian/Ubuntu doesn’t have garbage collection set-up by default in the apt-get version of PHP5. We changed it (see below) and voila– session management.

session.gc_probability = 1 session.gc_divisor = 100

By: Mike DeWolfe

Mike DeWolfe — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:06:50 +0000

Hello Randy,
Great tips. Our session table is also a runaway. Heavy hitter like the Google spiders do the most damage. The two of them are responsible for over 100,000 records. With each hit, they spawn a new session and rack them up with lightning speed.

Great site, BTW, Randy.

- Mike

By: Rand B. Wilson

Rand B. Wilson — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:22:43 +0000

Alessandro Bonelli said:

Hi,

I tried your solution, but after a while (maybe two days), session table grows again…

No it’s more than 9000 rows.

That’s strange Alessandro; are you sure you made the session expire-time short enough?
The changes above worked for me – i’m wondering if maybe your settings are being overridden somwhere like in your HTACCESS file or elswhere.