Removing Stale Sessions in Heroku Written By: Ben Wyrosdick May 11th, 2009

Removing stale session in any app is necessary to keep a clean and happy DB. With Heroku apps it is even more important since you don’t want to pay more for a bloated DB with stale data. Heroku makes it easy to run cron tasks by calling ‘rake cron’ against your app every hour. for more info on Heroku cron support see their docs page.

To setup your cron job on Heroku create the file lib/tasks/cron.rake and place the following code in your file:

task :cron => :environment do
  puts "Removing stale sessions ..." 
  session_count = CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.delete_all(['updated_at < ?', 1.hour.ago])
  puts "#{session_count} sessions removed" 
  puts "done." 
end