Storing PHP sessions in memcached instead of in files

in php.ini:

session.save_handler = memcache
session.save_path = "tcp://serv01:11211,tcp://serv02:11211,tcp://serv03:11211"


Obviously, you need php5-memcache installed, replace “serv1” “serv2” and “serv3” with valid server address(es), and you’ll need to restart your Apache server after making the change.

Why would you need to do this? Well, this week I had to deal with a web application server pool that kept slowly increasing its number of children all the way up to MaxCli, no matter what. It was unpredictable, other than being a slow creep. Eventually, stracing the pids showed that they were getting stuck in FLOCK on files in /var/lib/php5/php_sess*. This turns out to be an endemic problem with PHP that the devs don’t seem inclined to fix: php’s garbage collector will delete session files dirtily if a php process (which in the case of mod_php, means an Apache process) violates any of the php limits, such as max_execution_time (among many, many others). So you end up with your php script trying to lock a session file (file descriptor 3) that php’s garbage collector already deleted, and therefore an infinitely hung process that will never go away on its own.

Changing over to using memcache to store php sessions eliminated this file lock issue and resulted in a much more stable situation – a server pool that had been creeping up to 800 children per server over the course of a couple hours has been running stable and sweet on less than 150 children per server for days now.