Problem with sessions(?)

[Nicola]

Hi there,

we do have a problem with our server which might result from some
serendipity-prob (?)

We drive http://www.shopanbieter.de on serendipity:
"Betrieben mit Serendipity 1.0.1 und PHP 4.4.9"

Since some weeks our server goes down every some days or
more. Problem is, the partition where tmp-files are stored runs
out of space.

What we see is, that there are a LOT of user sessions. Even in
times with low frequency there are more than 12 sessions opened
per minute!

We find logs like that:
serendipityAuthedUser|b:0;HTTP_REFERER|s:74:"http://www.shopanbieter.de/
news/archives/1921-Excel-Jahresplaner-2009.html";spamblock|a:1:{s:7:"cap
tcha";s:4:"27BN";}

Why/where are these sessions opened? What can we do? What
additional infos do you need to help?

Thanks a lot - this is a very serious and urgent problem for us!

Best regards
Nicola

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

First off, serendipity 1.0.1 is a dinosaur, and it has security issues. Upgrade ASAP!

Secondly - s9y creates a session for every visitor. If you get 12 sessions per minute, you actually have at least 12 visits per minute. Those can come from spammers. But how small is your /tmp storage? You shouldn't really have trouble because each session file is maybe 1024 bytes. So even with 100.000 visitors per 20 minutes (the session files are cleared by PHP by default every 21 minutes), you'd only need 100MB of disk space...

Regards,
Garvin