XF 2.2 The table ‘xf_session_activity’ is full

[bburton]

What might cause the xf_session_activity table to become repeatedly full resulting in the contents of forum pages not loading and an error message displaying instead?

The 'hourly clean up' cron job is running, so that's not the reason. This is occurring between those hourly clean ups - about every 20 minutes or so. Running the 'hourly clean up' manually temporarily 'fixes' the problem, then 20 minutes or so later the xf_session_activity table fills up again and this error occurs repeatedly:

XF\Db\Exception: MySQL query error [1114]: The table 'xf_session_activity' is full
src/XF/Db/AbstractStatement.php:230

There is not an unusual number of logged in users. Nothing appears unusual with the number of logged in registered users.

Thanks,

 

[Bozza]

sadly after hours of fixing this earlier today, the situation has repeated itself starting at 4am with 20,000 connected users and the site is no longer displaying any pages vs a generic "an error occured while the page was being generated, please try again later" with the server log just showing thousands of entries of:

• The table 'xf_session_activity' is full

Oh man - sounds so similar to mine.

Have you tried Cloudflare - if you follow what I did above, you should see which countries are flooding your site and put a hard block on them.

 

[TUG]

i guess thats the only option though ive confirmed that the server itself isnt even breaking a sweat even with the 20,000 connections so its not so much a hardware issue vs whatever limitations this particular table has that allows it to fill up and bring down the entire forum.

 

[TUG]

noticed it didnt even take 7000 "guests" to break it this evening at 4am. i suppose the regular chron job ran to clear out the table on its own as it started working about 10min ago. looking at the IPs a huge % of them all coming from 177. and 179. and other similar subnets showing from brazil.

out of curiosity, does any of the options within the admin cp trigger this job to run manually vs waiting for its regular schedule to truncate that table?

will say i opened a ticket with xf support earlier this afternoon when it started but have gotten no reply yet

 

[TUG]

looking at the log file. the errors started at 3:03am in the xenforo server log indicating the table was full.

they stopped on their own at 4:11am so im guessing the job runs once an hour perhaps and it just filled up nearly instantly after the 3am run time?

 

[TUG]

just a final update. xenforos (and my hosts) suggestion was to install cloudflare.

in the meantime, host was able to block all traffic from vietnam, brazil, ukraine and russia. and that alone has wiped out 90% of the bot traffic we were seeing (sofar at least).

they also modified the settings mentioned above to boost the table/heap size to 64mb