sessions

I am pleased to report that I have been successful at creating a single login for all ourmedia.org Drupal sites (even of different versions). It took a while to figure this out and in the end I used a combination of xmlrpc to sync sessions and changed the Drupal settings.php to allow for a shared cookie between all subdomains. It took me several days to figure this out as there were several bugs encountered along the way and lots of testing required (thank goodness many of my colleagues were at a conference and I could get some quality time to work on this - that's a rare opportunity these days). In the end, these posts turned out to have valuable information:

• http://drupal.org/node/74350
• http://drupal.org/node/110281
• http://drupal.org/node/117917

I have been manually cleaning out the sessions table for some time now. We get about 8000 records per hour and so it does not take long to reach several hundred thousand records. Things start to bog down then. The system becomes very slow, especially if we are displaying the "Who's online" block on the home page, which is something we like to do. Also, the query to delete old session records can take quite a while to perform (up to 18 minutes that I have seen).