sessions not timing out

jrmatmillerclan

[a followup, in some sense, to the "really stupid newbie" question from yesterday...]

So, I have a set of pages that read and write session variables to do their stuff. All is well.

I go into php.ini and set session.cache_expire to a very short value (2 minutes, just for testing purposes), and restart Apache.

I do some stuff on page1.php, which sets up the session variables, and then stop and wait for the timeout period to expire.

I then click on a link to go on to page2.php, which depends on the session variables set in page1.php; it in fact prints them out for debugging purposes. Since the session has timed out, these should now be blank, right?

The problem is, they're not -- the print statements show them to have the same values they used to, and eveything proceeds as if no timeout had taken place.

Arggh. Am I missing something here? For what it's worth, I'm running Apache 1.3.27, php 4.2.3, and RedHat 8.0.

localhost

Normally (in theory) php.ini is setted to destroy sessions after 24 minutes of
INACTIVITY

This parameter

session.gc_maxlifetime

specifies the number of seconds after which all data will be interpreted as 'garbage' and will be cancelled.

the default is 1440 sec = 24 min

with this parameter in php.ini:

session.use_cookies

you can choose to use cookies or no (default=1)

then there is an other parameter

session.use_only_cookies

specifies that only cookies will be used to register the session id(default=0)

in theory you can change all from the script(PHP_INI_ALL)
with the function

ini_set("parameter", "value");

example:

ini_set("session.gc_maxlifetime", "600") //10 minutes

now how is your php.ini setted?

jrmatmillerclan

I'm set up to use cookies (although I don't see a "session.use_only_cookies" variable in my php.ini file.

In any case, I changed session.gc_maxlifetime to 60 -- one minute -- and restarted Apache, but the session vars are still showing up after this amount of time. So something still seems to be not working right. session.gc_probability is still set to its default value of 1, and I confess I don't really understand what that does.

Any further advice?