.session files. What are these for ?

[irwebonline]

Just looked in my ftp folder and ive come across loads of these .session files. Can anyone tell me what they are for please.

thanks
www.irwebonline.com

[NormanRouxel]

They're each customers shopping cart. They're just plain text (although with attributes that prevent them being read on the server except by the Perl scripts for security reasons).

Norman

[irwebonline]

so they only appear each time someone adds something to their shopping basket ?

That would be extremely strange as i have 30 or so of them in my acatalog folder right now. Surely if that many people added something to the cart then a good percentage of them would follow through with the order.

If thats the case then i must be doing something wrong elsewhere on the site.

[NormanRouxel]

Look at the creation dates on these files to see how current they are.

I'm pretty sure Actinic is meant to delete any unused carts automatically after a day or two (to allow the customer to reconnect and resume shopping).

Norman

[irwebonline]

yeh they are all from the past couple of hours.
Weird. i suppose ill have to look into why customers are adding to the card but not following through with their orders.