"Monitoring Your Rails Sessions With Scout" by derek

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:59:00 CDT

An oft-forgotten maintenance issue on Ruby on Rails applications is forgetting to expire old sessions. Lots of sessions in your database can dramatically slow performance.

You can use a cron job to expire old sessions, but it’s not always foolproof. We’ve seen timeouts when attempting to delete lots of session records and it’s not out of the range of possibilities to mistakenly disable multiple cron jobs.

Tim Morgan provided the inspiration for our latest plugin, Rails Session Monitoring. The plugin is dirt simple, reporting back the total number of sessions and the number of old sessions (you can define what constitutes old – the default is 14 days).

Here’s what I saw when I ran it on of our apps:

This is also the type of plugin that you don’t really need to run frequently – once-per-day is probably fine.

Scout ~ The Blog comments on Monitoring Your Rails Sessions With Scout

"Monitoring Your Rails Sessions With Scout" by derek