Hey.

I've got a tmp-folder with 14 million php session files in my home directory. At least that's what I think it is, it's not like I could ls it or anything.

How can I empty this folder? I've tried using find with the -exec rm {} \; commands but that didn't work. ls 'sess_0*' | xargs rm did neither.

I'm currently running rm -rf tmp but after two hours the folder appears to be the same size.

REFERENCE INFO:

I suddenly encountered an error where SESSIONS could no longer be written to disk:

[Mon Apr 19 19:58:32 2010] [warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Warning: Unknown: open(/var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp/sess_8e12742b62aa68a3f9476ec80222bbfb, O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28) in Unknown on line 0

[Mon Apr 19 19:58:32 2010] [warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp) in Unknown on line 0

I ran:

$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 457G 126G 308G 29% / tmpfs 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 664K 9.4M 7% /dev tmpfs 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /dev/shm

But as you can see, the disk isn't full.

So I had a look in the syslog which says the following 20 times per second:

kernel: [19570794.361241] EXT3-fs warning (device md0): ext3_dx_add_entry: Directory index full!

This led me thinking to a full folder, obviously, but since my web folder only has 60k files (having counted them), I guessed it was the tmp folder (the local one, for this instance of php) that messed things up.

Some commands I ran:

$ sudo ls sess_a* | xargs rm -f bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument list too long

find . -exec rm {} \; rm: cannot remove directory '.' find: cannot fork: Cannot allocate memory

I'm running Debian Lenny, php5, ISPConfig, SuEXEC and Fast-CGI.