Server Session Issues

middleman666

Hi There,

I have a client using fasthosts as their host. I've built a website that uses sessions to keep users logged in etc.

We are on a shared server and are experiencing problems, first it was coming up with a FastCGI error (what ever that is) and we were later told it had something to do with php sessions.

I don't know what other sites are on the server, but I'm a bit paranoid it's going down because of all the php sessions I'm using.

Does anyone know if me creating sessions could cause the server to first lagg and then go down?

Tech support are looking into it now, but I don't think they'll give us any details as to the cause of the problem.

Thanks.

HalfaBee

Shared hosting always has its share of problems.
I doubt if sessions are the problem, they are normally just a file that is loaded when the script runs.

Servers going down are part of website hosting, shared servers are prone to problems when they are overloaded.

devinemke

i have often seen problems with permissions on shared servers with wherever the server has decided to store session files (often /tmp/ on a *nix server). i would suggest you store your sessions files in your own web space (above your doc root). if you have direct access to your php.ini you can do this with the session.save_path directive or you can accomplish the same thing at runtime via [man]ini_set[/man]. if you do this you might have to write your own garbage collection routine. i usually run a cron every hour or so that flushes any idle session that is an hour old.