Joomla Session Automatically Logs Out, No Content

Question

I am running a Joomla 1.6 site, which I recently moved to a new server. I moved the site file system using rsync, and I replicated the MySQL database using MySQL utilities. The previous server has running Ubuntu server 10.10 and the new one is Ubuntu Server 11.10. Everything seems to be working correctly, except one thing...

In the site configuration, a user's session is set to expire after 24 hours. On the previous site it had been working correctly. On this new site, I have found that after a user logs in successfully and uses the site for some time, the user is logged out intermittently (randomly?), well before 24 hours, and then upon logging back in to the site (even in the back-end) the site is completely blank. The main menu is not there and there is no content. The logout button still appears, however, and the main banner. If the user logs out and then logs back in, usually all the content appears again like it should, and the site continues to function properly until the next time the session is booted.

Does anybody have any experience with this? Is there a place a can start debugging to find out why the session is ended abruptly? Why can I log in to the site and still not see any content?

Answer 1

More news. After long debugging the issue was related by an exception in the core which was not properly handled (related to saving an item with a duplicate alias, i.e. saving a second article in the same category with the same title/alias).

For us it was enough to migrate to J 2.5.3 to solve the issue.

Anyway, as a general comment, such behaviour could be related to an error in some Joomla files, which should leave traces in your error_log (else enable error logging).

It took my customer 3 months to understand what they were doing and describe it so finding an error might speed up the diagnostics.

Answer 2

I share the same issue. Being logged out, then logging back in and seeing nothing. It is very random, and will happen 10 times in a row, or never for two weeks.

This happens on a site that's quite complex (plenty of extensions), and has some traffic (5000 hits/day + 100 admin access / day) on J. 1.7

There is obviously something wrong with the session management.

In an attempt to make the site faster we have tweaked the database and moved the session table to memory, and I believe this may be the key aspect here.

Once we had repeated errors happening and clearing the sessions table solved it (until the next day), so I would guess it's connected to the in-memory sessions table.

If your table is in memory, try moving it to disk; if it's not, try emptying it and see if it happens again, and post back! Good luck