Arbitrary file limit in garbage-collection cron script causes loss of service

[Chris Fryer]

PHP in Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS includes /etc/cron.d/php5:

 09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -n 200 -r -0 rm

$ dpkg -S /etc/cron.d/php5
php5-common: /etc/cron.d/php5

if your server generates PHP sessions faster than they can be deleted by the cron job, the disk on which /var/lib/php5 is located will run out of inodes, and thence to a loss of service.

It is caused by this upstream workaround:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=461755#20

The latest version of the cron job that does PHP session garbage collection is here:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-php/php.git;a=blob;f=debian/php5-common.php5.cron.d;hb=HEAD

This is related to Bug #316441 and Bug #482720

[Dave Walker (davewalker)]

Thanks for raising this bug. This will be fixed in oneiric with the next merge, and i have opened a task against Lucid.

Thanks.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

This should be already fixed in pangolin.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

lucid has seen the end of its life and is no longer receiving any updates. Marking the lucid task for this ticket as "Won't Fix".