cleanup php session files

Question

On  my website I use PHP sessions  Session information is stored in files in my   session path  After a few months I discovered that these session files are never deleted  by now there are 145 000 of them in this directory    How should these be cleaned up  Do I have to do it programmatically  or is ther a setting I can use somewhere that would have this cleanup happen automatically   EDIT forgot to mention  This site runs at a provider  so I don t have access to a command line   I do have ftp-access  but the session files belong to another user  the one the webserver proces runs I guess  From the first answers I got I think it s not just a setting on the server or PHP  so I guess I ll have to implement something for it in PHP  and call that periodically from a browser  maybe from a cron job running on my own machine at home

User · Answer

Debian Ubuntu handles this with a cronjob defined in  etc cron d php5     etc cron d php5  crontab fragment for php5    This purges session files older than X  where X is defined in seconds    as the largest value of session gc maxlifetime from all your php ini    files  or 24 minutes if not defined   See  usr lib php5 maxlifetime    Look for and purge old sessions every 30 minutes 09 39                 root     -d  var lib php5    amp  amp  find  var lib php5  -type f -cmin     usr lib php5 maxlifetime  -print0   xargs -r -0 rm   The maxlifetime script simply returns the number of minutes a session should be kept alive by checking php ini  it looks like this     bin sh -e  max 1440  for ini in  etc php5   php ini  do         cur   sed -n -e  s     space    session gc maxlifetime   space        space       0-9          1 p   ini 2 gt  dev null    true             -z   cur     amp  amp  cur 0             cur  -gt   max     amp  amp  max  cur done  echo     max 60    exit 0

User · Answer

To handle session properly  take a look at http   php net manual en session configuration php   There you ll find these variables    session gc probability session gc divisor session gc maxlifetime   These control the garbage collector  GC  probability of running with each page request   You could set those with ini set   at the beginning of your script or  htaccess file so you get certainty to some extent they will get deleted sometime

User · Answer

Use cron with find to delete files older than given threshold   For example to delete files that haven t been accessed for at least a week   find  session  -atime  7  -exec rm

User · Answer

My best guess would be that you are on a shared server and the session files are mixed along all users so you can t  nor you should  delete them  What you can do  if you are worried about scaling and or your users session privacy  is to move sessions to the database   Start writing that Cookie to the database and you ve got a long way towards scaling you app across multiple servers when time is due   Apart from that I would not worry much with the 145 000 files

User · Answer

cd to sessions directory and then   1  View sessions older than 40 min   find   -amin  40 -exec stat -c   n  y         2  Remove sessions older than 40 min   find   -amin  40  -exec rm

User · Answer

You can create script  etc cron hourly php and put there      bin bash  max 24 tmpdir  tmp  nice find   tmpdir  -type f -name  sess    -mmin    max  -delete   Then make the script executable  chmod  x     Now every hour will be deleted all session files with data modified more than 24 minutes ago

User · Answer

Use below cron   39 20               root     -x  usr lib php5 maxlifetime    amp  amp    -d  var lib php5    amp  amp  find  var lib php5  -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin     usr lib php5 maxlifetime  -print0   xargs -r -0 rm

User · Answer

Every 30 minutes  not on the hour lt br gt    Grabs maxlifetime directly from   php -i   lt br gt    doesn t care if  var lib php5 exists  errs go to  dev null lt br gt   09 39           find  var lib php5  -type f -cmin    echo    php -i grep -i session gc maxlifetime cut -d    -f3     60    bc  -exec rm -f         gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1   The Breakdown  Only files    find  var lib php5  -type f Older than minutes   -cmin  Get php settings     echo   php -i grep -i session gc maxlifetime  Do the math    cut -d    -f3    60    bc   RM matching files   -exec rm -f

User · Answer

In case someone want s to do this with a cronjob  please keep in mind that this   find  session  -atime  7  -exec rm         is really slow  when having a lot of files   Consider using this instead   find  session  -atime  7   xargs -r rm   In Case you have spaces in you file names use this   find  session  -atime  7 -print0   xargs -0 -r rm   xargs will fill up the commandline with files to be deleted  then run the rm command a lot lesser than -exec rm        which will call the rm command for each file   Just my two cents

[php] cleanup php session files

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