Question

Basically, a php session won’t expire while a user is surfing on a website. But “while the user is surfing on the website” means that there are get and post requests. Nevertheless, i can’t figure out if there has to be new requests, or if one active request is enough to maintain the session…

For instantce, i have a big file upload by post. It could then take hours. Will the session expire or not ?

Answer 1

The lifetime of a session depends on the ini setting session.gc-maxlifetime. Every access to the session (read and write) resets the timer. After the timeout, when the session garbage collector runs, the session values are destroyed.

The default value is 1440, which means 24 minutes. So if you have hits that access the session in any way at least every 24 minutes, the session values will stay.

If you need the session to stay alive longer than that, you can extend the timeout with ini_set (use before session_start()), for example:

ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 24*60*60); // 24 hours