Huge number of php session files after phpmyadmin installation

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#1 Tue, 09/17/2019 - 14:59
sintos

Huge number of php session files after phpmyadmin installation

Hello,

I have Virtualmin with Nginx in Ubuntu 18.04.3 I installed phpmyadmin in a user account and after installation there are thaousand of php session files (sess_*) created in /home/user/tmp directory. Most of these files are empty, but some of them have a string like "PMA_token |s:16:"nrX`,!h;vWgzhRAb";errors|a:0:{}" I can understand that it has something to do with phpmyadmin. I removed phpmyadmin, but the files keep getting created. Any help hiw to eliminate this ?

Thank you

Tue, 09/17/2019 - 15:07
sintos

I have the same issue with php 7.2 and php 7.3.

Both are running as PHP-FPM.

Thank you

Tue, 09/24/2019 - 09:23
anahata
anahata's picture

I think this happens wherever a site has users logging in, and hence sessions. That would be PHPMyAdmin but also any other site with logged in users, such as Wordpress sites. I recently found 17,000+ session files in one WP site that is quite heavily used, and thats with Apache so it has nothing to do with nginx either.

Once I was sure what these files were, I installed a cron job to delete any session files over a month old. I think PHP should expire them automatically, but it wasn't doing a very good job of it. If someone knows a better way, I'm listening.

Anahata www.treewind.co.uk West Yorkshire, UK

Thu, 12/19/2019 - 06:46
air-ggtr

I have same problem. I don't know how it came. Maybe it's because of some plugins or not? But it's not sure. If finding a solution and disturbing, please tell. thank you very much.

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Thu, 12/19/2019 - 07:36
anahata
anahata's picture

It's quite simple to delete them with a cron job. I created a file in /etc/cron/daily with these contents:

#!/bin/bash
#expire session files more than a week old in /home/*/tmp

find /home/*/tmp/ -ctime +7 -type f  -name "sess*" | xargs rm

Adapted from a suggestion I saw posted on another forum, and modified from what I'm actually running now because I'm no longer using Virtualmin and the session files are on a different path. So check code before using!

The +7 sets a file age of 1 week: that can be changed to any number of days you like. On one busy Wordpress site I have 17000 files even now; I've checked and they are all under a week old.

Anahata www.treewind.co.uk West Yorkshire, UK

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