Techniques are provided for predicting and deleting idle remote sessions in a distributed file system. In an example, a server that serves a plurality of server message block (SMB) sessions analyzes with linear regression techniques those sessions to determine which sessions will become idle. In some examples, the server can then proactively close a SMB session that it predicts that an administrator would choose to close after a given idle period of time, or recommend to an administrator that the SMB session can be closed.