XF 1.5 Members getting booted, having trouble logging in after upgrade

[Joeychgo]

After upgrading to the latest XF -- I have members on several sites complaining about getting booted from the site and complaining about having trouble logging in.

Here are some of the comments:

Just an FYI: Since the update I'm continually getting booted particularly when clicking the "recent posts" button. Just a bit annoying.

Just got booted again. Looking through "Recent Posts", scrolled through 2 or 3 pages then got punted.

I cleared my cookies etc a couple minutes ago for another reason, when I clicked on
"New Posts" I got booted and had to log back in.

and some users have emailed me with trouble logging in:

What is up with login? Could no longer login, tried resetting password 2x, no worky.

 

[Chris D]

I'm not sure what versions you were on previously but I can confidently say that there has been no other reports of this behaviour nor anything that has changed in any 1.5 version that would cause this.

I was initially going to suggest it could have been some sort of URL canonicalisation issue; e.g. not redirecting http to https or www to non-www or any such combination, but having a look around your site I can see that doesn't appear to be a problem.

However, also, I can't see the issue happening myself either.

One possibility is if you are using anything for caching sessions (we support memcached out of the box). Sometimes if the caching provider is crashing or running out of disk space or not configured correctly then it can result in sessions being dropped, which would effectively log people out.

and some users have emailed me with trouble logging in:

We'd need more info than "no worky" but I've just tried a password reset myself on one of the sites and it worked fine. I'd suggest trying the lost password process yourself or asking for an elaboration as to what wasn't working (error message etc.).

 

[Joeychgo]

That's part of the problem, I cant reproduce it and its not happening to everyone. I've had enough to know its not a user problem. Its happening to both mobile and desktop users, chrome and IE users - users of different user groups --- I cant find a common denominator.

 

[Chris D]

One possibility is if you are using anything for caching sessions (we support memcached out of the box). Sometimes if the caching provider is crashing or running out of disk space or not configured correctly then it can result in sessions being dropped, which would effectively log people out.

If it appears to be indiscriminate and it's happening on multiple sites then looking into whether you're employing any session caching and whether there's any issues with it would be the first step.

 

[Mike]

The other somewhat common cause is caching happening outside of XenForo. Often, the simple presence of an X-Nginx-Cache-Status header indicates this is happening and then quite possibly the cause.