XF 2.2 Too many Guests

[emaw]

Hi all, happy 2025!

Our forum is small and never has over 20 registered users logged in, but recently it's been getting stuck due to 3000+ "Guests"/unregistered visitors arriving at the same time, which eventually triggers this error:

• MySQL query error [1114]: The table 'xf_session_activity' is full

and the forum content becomes unavailable and displays a standard message on the front end about a problem generating content. Then it seems to resolve itself and the content comes back up, but this is happening more and more often - a few times a day now. I suspect content scrapers for AI but i just really want the forum to be stable again.

I've set the forum not to display to unregistered users, but that makes no difference

I've checked access logs - user agents and IP addresses are not showing any obvious (to me anyway) culprits whose IP I could block

I've looked up the database error and found various obscure suggestions but i hope there may be a better way to sort this out than fiddling with the database?

Any suggestions would be very much appreciates, thanks in advance

 

[MySiteGuy]

Is it a matter of changing the table type with phpmyadmin?

Yes.

alter table tablename engine=innodb;

This will prevent the crash, but will not fix the underlying issue with too many bots.