Symfony Session values get lost on specific server

Question

Summary: Application developed on PHP Symfony 1.4.8 loses symfony session values randomly but exclusively on specific production environment: array symfony/user/sfUser/attributes gets empty within seconds or minutes after user authentication. Issue doesn't occur on development machine or at any other production environment.

It seems to be clear the issue is specific to the failing server, However, I wonder if could there be any PHP / Apache / Symfony configuration I might be missing that could solve the issue at the failing server?

Failing Server PHP Info:

PHP Version 5.3.10
System SunOS 5.10
Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/5.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8p
Max Requests Per Child: 0 - Keep Alive: on - Max Per Connection: 100
Timeouts Connection: 300 - Keep-Alive: 15
Session Support: enabled
Registered save handlers: files user sqlite
Registered serializer handlers: php php_binary
session.cache_expire: 180
session.cache_limiter: nocache
session.cookie_lifetime: 0
session.gc_divisor: 100
session.gc_maxlifetime: 1440
session.gc_probability: 1
session.use_cookies: On
session.use_only_cookies: On

Working Server PHP Info:

PHP Version 5.2.17
System Linux 2.6.32.59-sg2 #3 SMP
Apache/1.3.42 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5
Session Support: enabled
Registered save handlers: files user sqlite memcache
Registered serializer handlers: php php_binary wddx
session.cache_expire: 180
session.cache_limiter: nocache
session.cookie_lifetime: 0
session.gc_divisor: 1000
session.gc_maxlifetime: 1440
session.gc_probability: 1
session.use_cookies: On
session.use_only_cookies: Off

Symfony Session Settings for both servers at All environments:

  storage:
    class: sfSessionStorage
    param:
      session_name: webapp

  user:
    class: myUser
    param:
      timeout: 7200

I have already checked over this similar issue Symfony 1.4 sessions randomly lost, however I am not using the sfMemcacheCache class.

Let me know if you might need any extra info to answer this question.

Have you tried to use a different storage class? Like sfPDOSessionStorage for example — j0k
We have the same issue - but we haven't defined sfSessionStorage. — Del Pedro
@j0k No, I haven't... Will try to that and keep you posted... — JLCG
There is some type of balance load involved so I am assuming it could be more than one... — JLCG

0x6A75616E 0x6A75616E · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-27T16:28:11

This is probably an obvious thing to check, but maybe the server's out of disk space?

The default session store is file-based, so if you're losing data at random it sound like you're having some hard drive/file system issues.

If you're still curious, you can try changing the location where sessions are stored to another location, hopefully on a different disk.

Symfony Session values get lost on specific server

2 Answers