Architecting Session Management in Laravel: A Deep Dive into Garbage Collection for Transient User Applications
An application's architecture must account for its specific traffic patterns and user behavior. The foresight to question the default session management configuration in a transient, single-visit application demonstrates a mature approach to software engineering. The core concern—that a sessions table managed by Laravel's database driver could grow indefinitely under these conditions—is not only valid but highlights a critical, often overlooked scalability risk.
The default probabilistic garbage collection (GC) mechanism in Laravel is a clever solution for a very specific type of application: one with consistent, high-volume traffic where the statistical chance of cleanup aligns with the rate of session expiration. However, for an application where users visit once and may not generate enough traffic volume to reliably