Question

Possible Duplicate:
PHP sessions timing out to quickly

In my .htaccess file I have set

php_value session.gc_maxlifetime 14400 

i.e. for 4 hours

if I verify using echo ini_get('session.gc_maxlifetime'); I get 14400. But still my session expires in, say, less than 2 hours.

What do you think is going wrong here? any help appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

• Some distributions (Debian, at least) have a cronjob that removes old sessions a regular interval. This cronjob gets the session.gc_maxlifetime setting from the system’s php.ini and thus ignore your vhost config.

  Solutions:

  • Set session.gc_maxlifetime in the system’s php.int (e.g. /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini)
  • Move the sessions for this vhost to a separate directory (set session.save_path)
             
              
• An other probable cause is that the session cookie expire before session itself. Make sure that the session.cookie_lifetime variable is at least equal to session.gc_maxlifetime (or 0).