calling all session gurus

[Anon]

I am running a small app that displays pictures. It consists of 7 different pages, that access/write data to session variables throughout the 7 pages. My problem is that I seem to randomly lose all the data contained within the session variables, when going from page to page. It never happens in the same places. At first I thought maybe some garbage collection was going on and that my sessions were bieng deleted. I echoed the SID and the variables out to each page, so I could see wether or not I was losing my session cookie. When the data from the session variables dissappears, the SID still echoes to the page. My gc_probability is 1, and the gc_lifetime is 1440. Any suggestions would help. If you know sessions through and through and would be willing to help me troubleshoot my code email me [e-mail], and I will share code.

I can use all the help I can get

[[deleted]]

If your session ID is carried through, there must be a problem with your session data itself.
Try reading the session file (check php.ini for the location of the session files)
and check if the data does indeed get written by each script.

[Anon]

I will check the data but I'm not sure if that would be the problem, because the data will write the way it's supposed to sometimes and then just not others. What I mean to say is this: The page that keeps randomly dropping the data, is a page that displays search results from a picture search. It takes the number of pictures matched and prints a line that says the searched returned that many pictures. Then I use the returned result set from the mysql query to populate two arrays, one containing the picture name, and one containing the picture's category ( I can use these two together to form a url for the picture) I then use the number of rows returned to populate another array so that it contains the number of pages that need to be displayed, and the starting point for each page(ie. page 1 starts at picture 0, page 2 starts at picture 6), I then display the pictures, tell the user what page they are on, and when they click the next button, the script calls itself again with a flag that tells it wether to advance or backup in the page array. So, since the script calls itself, why would it write data correctly on one pass, and not another?

If anyone is willing to help me debug this, I will gladly email the code, just mail me at
[e-mail]

[Anon]

what version of PHP are you using? sessions can be buggy in 4.0.1 and even (IIRC) 4.0.1pl1

[Anon]

I noticed this post about session data disappearing - and I ma having the same problem.
Did you ever resolve it? I am experiencing it after moving to a different web host.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Chris Holderness