Sessions table filling up

[Rastus]

My site has been up and running for several years now. ( Version 4.2.3) this past week I have been having issues with the Sessions table filling up repeatedly. Is this some new form of BOT attack or DDOS like attack? Nothing has been changed in the settings. all Cron are checked for hourly and daily cleanups.

[Wayne Luke]

There could be a number of reasons. There isn't enough information provided to determine the cause. The most likely causes are

1. that the scheduled cleanup task isn't actually running and returning an error.
2. the database user no longer has permission to delete records from the session table.
3. the cookie time out has been increased to a very large amount.

In the case of cause 1, if your server recently upgraded PHP for security reasons then the system can have issues like this. vBulletin 4.2.3 is not qualified to run on any modern version of PHP. You should upgrade to vBulletin 4.2.5 and PHP 7.1.

[Rastus]

I resolved my issue by blocking China from my forum. now this is happening to our VB forum where I work. We are going to move the forum behind a cloudfare layer for additional protection nd to see if this stops the flooding. -- Most users ever online was 11,506, Today at 01:59 PM. --- this has now happened to two forums I manage, one I own, one my employer owns. both about completely different subjects / content.

upgrading mine is a possibility, my employers is a whole nother animal.

[Wayne Luke]

Sounds like rampant bots or a denial of service attack. These are properly handled at the server and network levels before they get to an application like vBulletin. It is good that you were able to sort the issue.