Good day,

I have an issue with my web server. We are running RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0 with Apache 2.0 and Tomcat 5.5. The situation has arisen that the httpd sessions never terminate. New connections continue and continue to be created and never die. I have restarted the apache services to reset the connection and have even rebooted the server, however, to no avail. Yes, that does the trick of getting the web sites operational, however, this is not a solution.

I have searched and searched here, www.google.com/linux to no avail. I have looked through the apache.org bug tracker and can't find anything like what I am experiencing. This happened 6 months ago and I got lucky and it stopped, however, the situation has resurfaced. I have reviewed the logs and found nothing that provides any insight.

During the business day, the number of httpd connections continue to grow and I decided to let it see how high it would get before the web sites would crash. That magical number is 203. Now that it is later in the evening and about 2 hours since I restarted the httpd services, I now only have 59 connections. However, I'm fairly certain based upon the traffic on these 2 websites, that in the evening, there aren't many connections after 2000 hours.

All help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Lee

Are the sessions created by apache or tomcat? What sort of application is running on the server? If you are running a PHP application you may adjust settings in php.ini. -> session.gc_maxlifetime

1 members found this post helpful.

j-ray,

Thank you very much for your reply. I assume they are being created by apache as they are show with a ps -ef as httpd connections. The only thing running on this server is two java websites. I will have to verify with the developers to see if they are using php for any of the apps. I did find the session.gc_maxlifetime entry in php.ini and it is currently set at 1440 seconds. However, it appears there is an entry within the php.ini:

session.save_path = /tmp

Which based upon my reading makes the garbage collection null. There is a script that is enclosed within the php.ini below the entry for session.gc_maxlifetime with the following script:

cd /path/to/sessions; find -cmin +24 | xargs rm

So, I'm going to modify it to the correct path to the sessions (once I find it) and try this and see if this helps!

I will let you know. Thanks again for your assistance! It is greatly appreciated!

Sincerely,
Lee

j-ray,

I just confirmed with our developers that we are not using PHP on any of our web servers. But, thank you for the input!

Sincerely,
Lee