What is the purpose of the xoops_session table in the database ?

On one of the sites i host: http://www.debian-news.net in the database the xoops_session table contains a stagering 139241 records !!!

So i have a few questions about this table.

What is the purpose of this table ?

Why does it keep growing ? Even if i disable 'Use custom session' in preferences !!

Can i just truncate the table without any ill effects, like once a week ?
Or maybe run a script that takes the 'Session expiration' and removes records that are to old ?

I am running on XOOPS 2.0.13.2

Best Regards
Søren Reinke

Is there nobody here who know what this table is doing ?

The sessions table keep track of various information that needs to be preserved across page requests.

What expiration time do you have set for the sessions?

What date/time range do the session rows span? You can determine that with this query: SELECT from_unixtime(sess_updated) FROM xoops_session ORDER BY sess_updated DESC

Deleting old session rows shouldn't hurt anything. If you delete a session row that corresponds to a user who's currently accessing the site, I think that would just log him out.

Thanks for the clarification.

How come XOOPS does not clean up in these tables on its own ?

On another site http://www.xray-mag.com the timeout is 1 day, but there was session records from 2004 in the table.