swsessions table full

[escire]

We had something really odd with our esupport installation this morning, and I'm wondering if anyone has run into this before. I tried to login to the staff/admin CPs and got a sql error to the effect that the swsessions table was full. It had 79,000+ lines in it, all from the same outside IP. I assume a crawler was generating the sessions by trawling though our client CP. Because having the helpdesk offline was completely unaccetable, I just went and deleted everything with that IP from the swsessions table, and restarted sql and the webserver, which fixed the problem.

I am however very interested in keeping it from happening again. Has anyone run into this before?

Thanks.

[sfriz]

I've run into this issue before, and a similar one with the visitor_footprints table filling up and breaking chat. We are fortunate enough that our tech support dept. doesn't run 24hrs/day. So I have a cron job that cleans out the sessions table each night. As for the visitor_footprints, a cron job runs a little more often and cleans out entries that are more than x hours old. Another thing you might look at doing is upping the size of your tables so that they don't fill up quite as quickly. There are some limits in MySQL for MEMORY type tables which are probably fine unless you really hammer those tables. The limits can be bumped up so the tables have a little more headroom.

[escire]

Thanks sfriz. I'll just add that to my cron job which runs the backups in the middle of the night.