session timing out really fast, solution?

[energie]

I can't figure out why, I've searched here and many other places

i use the session object in my php site.

for some reason the session times out rather quickly, most of the time out of the blue

let say i just logged in, clicked around, and quite often it'll time out
within 5 minutes

i set the seession timeout variable in my php.ini to be 20 minutes

have you guys encountered anything like this before?

TIA

[jowatkins]

I don't know what the problem is but this might (possibly) help. I store all active users in the db when they log in, and remove them when they log out. Each time they make some action, I update the db with the date and time of that action. I then call the following function when at the beginning of each script to check how long they've been idle. You might like to use this instead, and set your php.ini timeout to a much greater length of time.

function check_timeout() 
{ 
global $valid_user; 
// set maximum idle time to 1 hour (3600) 
define ("MAX_IDLE", 3600); 
// set the timeout value to 1 hour ago 
$timeout = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()-MAX_IDLE); 
//where sessions have timed out., delete user from active_users and log them out 
$del_result = mysql_query ("DELETE FROM active_users WHERE lastaction < '$timeout'" 
if ($chk_result) 
{ 
$row = mysql_fetch_object ($chk_result); 
if $row->lastaction == "") 
{ 
echo "<br/>****Session Timed Out****<br/>"; 
echo ('<META Http-equiv="refresh" Content="1; Url=http://43.194.110.106/logout.php">'); 
exit; 
} 
else 
{ 
update_last_action(); 
} 
} 

hope it helps...

[energie]

that's a great idea

will performance suffer since you are updating the db everytime the user does something?