Telegram's Secret File Growth Is Crashing Servers—A Simple Fix Could Save You Hours of Debugging
The Unseen Culprit: Telegram's Growing sessions.json File
A silent, yet catastrophic, issue has been plaguing installations relying on certain Telegram bots and back-end integrations, leading to unexpected server crashes and complete service unavailability for many users. The culprit, identified through recent community sleuthing, is alarmingly simple: an unmanaged session file known as sessions.json. This unassuming configuration file, crucial for maintaining persistent connections, has become a digital time bomb within specific Telegram environments. As reported by observer @hnshah on Feb 9, 2026 · 9:24 PM UTC, the growing file size is directly correlated with system failure, forcing developers into frantic, manual recovery operations.
The core problem centers on how session data is written and managed, or rather, not managed, by the application’s underlying mechanism when interacting with certain API endpoints or custom bots. When an application maintains an active link or requires frequent re-authentication checks—often described as a "heartbeat"—it dutifully records this activity. However, this critical data is being appended sequentially to sessions.json without any safeguard against runaway growth, setting the stage for inevitable performance degradation and eventual hard failure.
Diagnosing the Loop: How the Bug Manifests
The technical mechanism behind this slow-motion crash is a textbook example of a failure in defensive programming against scale. Every single successful session update or routine system "heartbeat" triggers a new line—a complete JSON object—to be written onto the end of the sessions.json file. Crucially, the current implementation appears to lack any inherent log rotation, file size capping, or intelligent archival routine.
This oversight translates directly into an exponential growth curve. In environments generating frequent session activity, administrators have observed the file ballooning from negligible size to well over 50MB in a distressingly short timeframe. Once the file size crosses an undocumented internal threshold, Telegram components—likely struggling to map or read the massive file during initialization or routine access—cease functioning, resulting in server crashes or rendering the service entirely unresponsive.
The typical debugging ordeal associated with this issue has become infamous in recent days. Administrators, faced with an inexplicable outage, often waste significant time SSHing into servers, checking memory allocation, examining process lists, and tracing complex network errors, only to discover the problem isn't a deep infrastructure failure but a single, bloated text file. This wasted time, running into 45 minutes or more per incident, represents a substantial operational drag across multiple services.
The Session File Bloat: A Technical Breakdown
Technically speaking, the issue is the continuous appending of verbose JSON structures representing session tokens, device information, or connection metadata. While individually small, the cumulative effect when thousands or millions of these lines stack up is disastrous. Once the file size exceeds the critical threshold—reportedly around 50MB—the operating system's input/output (I/O) subsystem or the application’s internal memory management begins to choke. Attempting to load or even seek within such a large, continually written file places unacceptable strain on CPU and RAM, manifesting as service failure rather than a simple slowdown.
The Community Cry for Help: A Public Warning
The severity of the situation prompted swift action within the developer community that utilizes these Telegram functionalities. A critical advisory was issued publicly by user @pradeep24, specifically calling out the session file size bug and tagging relevant development channels, including @openclaw. This public warning, timestamped Feb 9, 2026, served as an undeniable signal flare regarding the imminent risk faced by any installation running the affected configuration.
The urgency conveyed in these posts highlights a critical gap between rapid application deployment and robust error handling in real-world, high-throughput scenarios. It is a stark reminder that even seemingly minor configuration details can cause cascading failures when coupled with high volumes of automated interaction, forcing the community to proactively warn peers about downtime risks.
Immediate Mitigation: A Practical, Scripted Solution
Given the immediate threat to operational stability, developers cannot afford to wait for an official patch. The consensus solution being rapidly deployed across affected servers involves implementing an external, recurring cleanup job. The primary goal of this automated task is to prevent the file from ever reaching the critical 50MB mark through proactive file management.
Administrators are strongly advised to set up a simple, periodic task—such as a cron job on Linux systems or a scheduled task on Windows—to manage sessions.json. This job should be set to run frequently enough to catch the runaway growth before it causes an outage, perhaps every hour or every few hours, depending on the volume of session traffic the specific service handles.
The instructions circulating suggest using basic shell scripting to interact with the file directly. While an official patch would ideally handle this internally, external intervention is the only viable short-term defense. This temporary scripting bypasses the buggy internal logic and ensures service continuity while awaiting the core software update.
Recommended Cleanup Strategy: Truncation vs. Pruning
When implementing the cleanup script, engineers face a choice between two primary strategies: simple truncation or intelligent pruning. Simple truncation involves using commands like truncate -s 0 or > sessions.json, effectively wiping the entire file clean. This is the quickest fix but risks momentarily disrupting all active sessions managed by that file, potentially forcing immediate re-authentication for all users connected through that process.
Conversely, intelligent pruning would involve reading the file, parsing the lines, and keeping only the most recent N entries before rewriting the file. While this maintains session state better, implementing reliable JSON parsing within a quick shell script adds complexity and introduces potential new failure points. For a temporary, life-saving fix, many experts are leaning toward aggressive, repeated truncation until the developers issue a robust, patched version of the software.
The Path Forward: Awaiting the Official Patch
This incident underscores a valuable lesson in the pressures of high-velocity development: failing to implement basic resource governance, like file rotation, can undermine the stability of an otherwise powerful platform. While the community has rallied effectively with immediate workarounds—saving countless hours of debugging via SSH—the ultimate solution must come from the core development team responsible for Telegram’s session handling logic. Until that official code fix lands, proactive server management, specifically the deployment of these automated cleanup jobs, remains the essential firewall against unexpected downtime.
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