LinLog

This is a note to my future self about an annoyance with Nextcloud.  If you're not aware of it, Nextcloud is basically a fork of ownCloud, which is a "self-hosted cloud" platform.  Basically, they both provide a bunch of cloud-based services, like file sync and share, calendar, contacts, and various other things.  I switched to Nextcloud last year because ownCloud was lagging way behind in its support for newer PHP versions.

Anyway, I noticed a rather annoying issue where Nextcloud was leaving hundreds of stale auth tokens in the database.  Apparently, I'm not the only person this has happened to.

While Nextcloud has a menu item to revoke and remove stale sessions on their settings page, it's on a per-item basis.  So if you have hundreds of stale sessions, the only way to remove them is to go through, one by one, and click the menu and select the "revoke" option.  Needless to say, this is terrible.

The less annoying solution is to just go straight into the database and delete them there.  You can just run something like:
DELETE FROM oc_authtoken WHERE last_activity < <whatever_timestamp>;
That might be ugly, but at least it doesn't take forever.

It's important to note that, in addition to being annoying, this is evidently also a performance problem.  From what I've read, it's the reason that authenticating to my Nextcloud instance had gotten absurdly slow.  The app responded fine once I was logged in, but the login process itself took forever.  It also seems to be the reason why my hosting provider's control panel has been showing I'm way over my allotted MySQL execution time.  After deleting all those stale sessions, not only is login nice and snappy again, but my MySQL usage dropped off a ledge.  Just look at this graph:

As you can see, January is a sea of red, and then it drops off to be comfortably under the limit after I deleted the old sessions.  The Nextcloud team really needs to fix this issue.