randomly dropping sessions

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey all,

Most of our customers get through our shopping cart no problem so orders continue to flow. However we've recently (past 10 days) started receiving reports of people not being able to add items to their cart. This seems to be affecting 2-3% of our customers. Taking a look at the logs I can see the sessions getting completely lost just as if the client had cookies disabled. I see no other warnings or errors.

We did have nearly 350k sessions accumulated in our sessions table which I cleared out to around 40k last night. We haven't got any reports since then but I can't say yet if it's helped. I'm sure their have been other times when our sessions table got that large without this problem. We have >>very<< beefy hardware for our needs so I would expect to be able to handle that number of sessions without trouble.

The site has been up for going on 3 years with no significant issues and has had no code changes other than some minor template/html tweaks in a couple months.

ubuntu 8.10 rails 2.1.0 && active_record_store mysql 5.0.51

Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Tim

2

Personally, I would add in the logic to clean up old sessions periodically or during login. Also, is there a reason you are not using Rails 2.1.2 or even better 2.2.2? Staying updated with Rails versions usually resolves any odd defect that you see.

Thanks, Mukund

3

Thanks for the input Muknd.

Personally, I would add in the logic to clean up old sessions periodically or during login.

Yeah, when I said that I cleared them out I actually setup a cron job to do it regularly.

Also, is there a reason you are not using Rails 2.1.2 or even better 2.2.2? Staying updated with Rails versions usually resolves any odd defect that you see.

I may soon but I suspect that's not really the issue here. I typically don't like to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading.

Thanks again! Tim