Question

I have a Chrome extension and I ran a debug on my analytics code producing a console message of “Exceeded maximum hits per session, aborting hit”. Note that this only happens in production.

I understand why this is happening as there is a limit of about 500 utm requests per session. However, when do these sessions expire? And is there a way to force the session or sessions to expire? I just need to expire these sessions once after an update that resolved some issues.

As the app was experiencing a bug that caused an “over-generating of events” I have resolved this issue and I want to expire all these sessions or know when they will expire.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

_gaq.push processing "_setAccount" for args: "[UA-XXXXXX-X]":  ssl.google-analytics.com/u/ga_debug.js:18
_gaq.push processing "_trackPageview" for args: "[]":  ssl.google-analytics.com/u/ga_debug.js:18
Track Pageview ssl.google-analytics.com/u/ga_debug.js:18
Exceeded maximum hits per session. Aborting hit. 

Answer 1

Personally, I don’t think the 500 requests per session limit should be reached. Maybe your website is over-generating events.

Here are some clues on what could be generating so many events:

Events Per Session Limit

For each visit (user session), a maximum of approximately 500 combined
GATC requests (both events and page views) can be tracked. Keep this
in mind when programmatically generating events. Note that—as the
number of events in a session approaches the limit—additional events
might not be tracked. For example, you should:

• avoid scripting a video to send an event for every second played and
  other highly repetitive event triggers
• avoid excessive mouse movement tracking
• avoid time-lapse mechanisms that generate high event counts

(from Google Analytic’s Event Tracking Guide)

And based on the following it appears that a visit lasts from the beginning of the month to the end of the month:

In order to understand how the Count of visits dimension works, it
helps first to understand how sessions are counted in Analytics. Each
time a user visits your site, there is a counter applied to their
visit that increments with each new session by that visitor. For
example, if Visitor A visits your site for the first time in January,
their session count is 1. If that visitor then returns in February,
their session count will be 2, and so on for each subsequent visit.

(Based on more background information on sessions, see the Google Analytics Help Center on this topic)

And maybe you could consider changing the session timeout.