Forum sql file increasing, data in smf_forumssessions

[Ray_Johnson]

Hi,

(I am using SMF 1.1.14)
Recently I got a warning e-mail from my web hosting company.
I have a webspace of max. 50 MB but apparantly I was taking up ... 1.6 GB of webspace ..!    The mail said to decrease my amount of data or they would close down my site.
I checked and the culprit was my SMF sql file. It was about 1.5 GB in size.
I was surprised by this because my forum has basically no activity since months.
I deleted all error messages, did a "Optimize all tables to improve performance", "Find and repair any errors", "Empty out any unimportant logs" and disabled generation of error messages.
Now my sql file is about 300 kB !
I have been monitoring the sql file and although there is still no traffic on the forum, I see that the "smf_forumssessions" table keeps growing in size.
Is there a way that I can stop this table to grow large (by disabling some option)?
Can I simply delete this table or its contents?

Kind regards
Ray

[ziycon]

Welcome to the site!

Admin > Server Settings > Feature Configuration and untick 'Use database driven sessions', this will log all your users out and they'll need to log in again, your forum will now use cookies instead of the database to maintain the sessions which will stop the session table increasing to a large size.

I would suggest moving host if you want to continue to use database driven sessions.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

The amount of garbage data sounds alarmingly high. You might want to take a look at this IMPORTANT: Large sessions table on Debian/Ubuntu Linux hosted forum?

[Ray_Johnson]

Welcome to the site!

Thanks! 

.. untick 'Use database driven sessions'

Ok, I changed that setting. I will keep an eye on the size of that table.
Can I delete the records in the 'smf_forumssessions' table manually (using hxxp:www.phpmyadmin.net [nonactive] )?

I would suggest moving host if you want to continue to use database driven sessions.

I will stick to this host for now. My forum has almost no traffic but I still like to keep it.
Thanks!!

[Ray_Johnson]

The amount of garbage data sounds alarmingly high...

The host server is running Linux indeed but I do not know which distro.
I will keep an eye on that table.
Thanks!

[Ray_Johnson]

My SMF database seems to have stopped growing since yesterday, by changing the suggested settings.
I have manually removed the records in 'smf_forumssessions' table.
Thanks for your help!

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Good that you've solved it