CacheFS and DirectAdmin troubles updating to 1.5.6

[gegbike]

Today we were working on upgrading from 1.4.4.0 to 1.5.6.0. Unfortunately, we haven't reached the point of actually upgrading the shop, because of problems with CacheFS and DirectAdmin.

 

CacheFS: we have always had problems with caching. The shop creates enormous amounts of data, but so far this has been managable. During manual purging of the cache (via FileZilla FTP) the shop creates the same amount of new cache files. Within minutes the folders will total 5gb again. The caching system creates 16 folders with more than 200.000 items in them, while our shop only has 7600 items in it.

Normally we would clean cache via the back-office using Preferences>Performance>Disable cache. However, this does not work at the moment: the shop will first run a sequence, then give a white screen of death. No problem, it used to always do that (mem shortage) and we would repeat the sequence. However, now it doesn't finish a  second go, and will switch to white screen within seconds, without clearing out the cache.

 

We tried to access the files via DirectAdmin and remove all files, but due to the enormous size of the index, the server will time out before reaching the subfolders.

 

Any clues what's going on here, and how we can resolve this? All searched within PrestaShop Forums didn't yield any results that apply to our case. Thanks for your time and suggestions.