Hello,
I am experiencing a curious thing on my Joomla/CB website.
Ever since a few months ago, I started to notice that the list of online users (most easily noticeable through the CB who is online module) kept getting longer. At some point, it seemed as if hundreds of users were all logged in. However, the majority of them probably weren't, they had logged in at some point but CB and the module kept showing them as logged in. When actually logging in as a user, however, I am automatically logged out again after a certain amount of time of inactivity.
The "session lifetime" setting in Joomla itself was set to 15 minutes. So it doesn't make sense that uses who logged in e.g. a week ago are still being shown as online hours, days and weeks of inactivity later.
In the past few days, I noticed that the Joomla website was starting to load much slower - and the issue kept getting worse, to the point that heavier pages on the site gave a 503 timeout error half the time.
What I did just now was change the "sessions lifetime" setting of Joomla to 1 minute. That effectively seems to have automatically logged everyone out, and immediately the website was loading fast again as it normally should. I am, however, staying logged in even when there's more than one minute of inactivity (which is fine for me).
In the meantime, the stats shown by the CB who is online module say that - in a matter of an hour - there are already over 1000 guests online again (aside from the logged in users). This is very weird, because I'm pretty sure our website doesn't attract that many visitors in such a short time.
Any idea what could cause this?