Woocommerce generates more sessions than users
This is my first WooCommerce installation, so maybe I don't understand what's going on, but what I see from Google Analytics is the site I put live last Friday, there were ~ 7500 sessions for yesterday, but the session count ( from _wp_session_expriry% query) there will probably be about 50,000 sessions in the wp_options table generated in the last 12 hours since I wiped all sessions. I destroyed the sessions because from the table this table has no indexes and yet WooCommerce hits it with a ton of session data, but then the killer was the usual WooCommerce temporary data deletion. It turned out that each of these deletes takes over a minute with 300,000 sessions in the table because the queries contain LIKEs.
So far I have checked that the robots are not going crazy and have been rummaging through the Apache logs, and although I have some IP addresses with a very high hit rate, I don’t understand why I would be getting new sessions for WooCommerce, but not Google Analytics. Apache logs show actual page images as per Google Analytics page count, so I suspect WooCommerce or plugins for this problem.
So now I have reduced the problem by indexing wp_orders and reducing the session expiration time to 2 hours, but that doesn't explain why I have this insane number of sessions in the first place.
I'm using the most recent of all: WP 3.9, WC 2.1.7+ plus some other WC plugins, one of which joins the WC (WooCommerce Currency Switcher) session, but it looks like it just connects to the session control.
So I have one big question, and then a more architectural one:
Biggest: Can anyone suggest why I am getting so many sessions in wp_options versus GA users (in order of magnitude)? And I'm much more confident.
And then: Is there a clean way to move WC sessions into a separate table? wp_options doesn't seem like an obvious choice, considering how everyone else uses it for a lot of CRUD actions that need to be responsive, I would expect to see the woocommerce_sessions table.
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Solution to clean up sessions in
Woocommerce > System Status > Tools, Clear all sessions
And also change your Robots.txt to exclude bots from running Woo-Cart :) The search engine bots go through all the add to cart buttons causing it to create a bunch of extra cart sessions.
Change your robots.txt; add this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*add-to-cart=*
I want woocommerce to automatically clean up this mess!
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We had this problem, the database was 1.3 GB! When this is so large, the above method of using "clear all sessions" suffocates. You need to run a query in mySQL (multiple times until they are cleaned up):
DELETE FROM wp_options
WHERE option_name LIKE '_wc_session_%' OR option_name LIKE '_wc_session_expires_%'
LIMIT 500
Or a plugin like this one might help: http://shop.webaware.com.au/downloads/delete-expired-transients/
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