The app at work uses PHP. I happened to notice a very large /tmp/phpsessions directory. I mean... the index is 74MB, let alone the files within.
So I discovered that yes: there's a cronjob that's supposed to be cleaning these guys out (in /etc/cron.d/php5). It uses "find -cmin" to find all files older than X minutes, and "rm"s them. However, it's doing this only in /var/lib/php5, and not /tmp/phpsessions. Digging around the conf file, I see that my predecessor (I assume?) had changed the default session directory to /tmp/phpsessions: ;session.save_path = /var/lib/php5 session.save_path = /tmp/phpsessions The comments in the php.ini file mention that garbage collection can be done by PHP itself, but when I looked at that section of the file, I saw: ; This is disabled in the Debian packages, due to the strict permissions ; on /var/lib/php5. Instead of setting this here, see the cronjob at ; /etc/cron.d/php5, which uses the session.gc_maxlifetime setting below So it seems that the cronjob, while checking the PHP ini files for gc_maxlifetime, doesn't actually pay attention to WHERE they're stored (save_path). The odd thing is, recent session files (and not many of them, so cleanup is happening as expected) also appear in /var/lib/php5. So some are getting stored there... I haven't figured out by whom, yet. And I know that /tmp/phpsessions is actively being used, because its timestamp always seems to be the current time. I'm finding that /tmp/sessions is, in fact, so big that "ls", "ls -U" and even "echo *" don't work. Attempts at "ls" can't even be aborted (^C) or suspended (^Z). So I'm wondering... what's the safest way to get this directory cleaned up? I'm thinking I need to create my own cronjob, based on the one that comes with Debian, to deal with the files living in "/tmp/phpsessions". (My initial thought was: "fix the existing cron job", but obviously it's maintained by packages, so I don't want my work being blown away by an upgrade, or confusing dpkg :) ) Thanks in advance! Now back to my OTHER problems at hand, -- -bill! Sent from my computer _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
