I'm running the latest version of LS 5.x and I'm storing session files on the file system. I'm seeing I have about 12 gigs of session files, dating back over 4 months.
Is there any good reason not to purge these session files after some period of time (eg: if they are more than a month old)? Why are session files sticking around for months? What is their purpose?
I'm running the latest version of LS 5.x and I'm storing session files on the file system. I'm seeing I have about 12 gigs of session files, dating back over 4 months.
How do you know that these are session files of LimeSurvey?
Depending on your webstack setup the php session settings could be something between global and appwise.
Check the session path and check the settings when the garbage collector marks the session files for deleting in one of the next runs.
www.php.net/manual/en/session.configurat...ssion.gc-maxlifetime
Perhaps the session folder you're looking at is no longer used and the old sessions files aren't removed anymore.
If the folder is correct and you are sure that the session files are from LimeSurvey, you can remove older session files. The files older than the max lifetime of the session are no longer used. Monitor if the files pile up again.
09,39**** root [-x /usr/lib/php/sessionclean ]&&if[!-d /run/systemd/system]; then /usr/lib/php/sessionclean; fi
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Last edit: 1 year 4 months ago by DenisChenu. Reason: on debian
Thanks for the guidance. The session files are definitely for LS, as they are in a custom path local to the hosting account:
/home/account/sessions/
Instead of the default server PHP session file path, which was on a small partition.
Based on your guidance, I'll run a script that purges session files that are older than 4 days (which is well past the garbage collector window). Not sure why the collector isn't clearing out the files, but that's for another day.
Sessions files typically store temporary data and keeping them for extended period might not be necessary. You can safely set up a crone job or scheduled task to delete session files older than a month.
Ex.
Code:
find /path/to/session/files -type f -name "sess_*"-mtime +30-exec rm {} \;
