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#10023 What does the 'Session Optimizer' of the plugin do

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

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PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by nicholas on Saturday, 10 September 2011 02:11 CDT

Friday, 09 September 2011 23:02 CDT

user357
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? No relevant article found
Have I searched the forum before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 1.5.23
PHP version: 5.3.2
MySQL version: 5.1.4
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Admin Tools version: 1.1.5

Description of my issue:

Just a question, what does the Session Optimizer feature of the plugin do - I know it says that it 'Optimizes' it, but specifically what does it do and is there a significant benefit to turning it on?

Right now, the plugin is enabled, but none of the options are turned on. If I leave them off, I guess I might as well disable it, but I would like the benefit of the optimization if it is worth it.

Thanks,
Royce

Friday, 09 September 2011 23:12 CDT

slaes
royce, my understanding of the feature is that its similar to cron job which is basically scheduled to repair and optimize the session db tables within the database which on a site with many users can obviously be beneficial if your not doing this periodically anyway, which on big db heavy sites is always a good practice anyway. Aside form good practice, its also got other benefits as well. Personally i run a similar script as a cron job servers wide for all tables and users on a regular basis.

Niko may be able to shed more light on it for you, but that's basically my understanding.

Saturday, 10 September 2011 02:11 CDT

nicholas
Joomla! creates a new session for every visitor of your site, even guests. No matter what your session storage preferences are, it always creates a record in the session database table (something which is bound to be fixed in Joomla! 3.x according to the Joomla! development mailing list). This record is deleted after the session expiration, as per your session lifetime settings in your site's Global Configuration.

On a relatively busy site this creates a problem. A lot of read/write/delete activity is going on on the sessions table. This fragments the table much like repeated disk activity causes file fragmentation on your hard disk. The session table optimisation feature of Admin Tools Professional works like "defrag". It will periodically have MySQL analyse and optimise the sessions table, keeping it in tip-top shape. If you don't do that you run the risk of the table becoming too fragmented -which degrades performance- or even corrupt. In the latter case, your site will stop working.

I strongly suggest turning on that feature and have it run about once every 30 minutes. The more often it runs, the less time it takes to run and the less possibility there is of the sessions table becoming corrupt.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
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