php sessions expiring

buducom

hello everybody

when somebody logs in and browses around the session seems to expire and throw him out after a while.
what can i do about this?

zonewatcher

Sounds as if there is a script without a session_start(). Is it losing the session in a particular place or while they perform a certain function?

rehfeld

having different links like this will cause problems if you dont prepare for it

http://foo.com
http://www.foo.com
http://subdomain.foo.com

keep in mind, www IS a subdomain of foo.com, even if you server sends identical content. so if some of your links use www. and some dont, this can and will cause problems

the solution is to explicity tell the browser that cookies for foo.com can also be used for www.foo.com and subdomain.foo.com

http://php.net/session

buducom

I still didnt solve my problem
Somebody told me to check
whether I load session start on all pages and somebody else told me to check whether i mix domains/subdomains.

like duno.net www.duno.net etc.

The problem is this:

You login to www.duno.net
and you surf around. then after a while the session variables are lost. Always on a different page at different time it seems.

I put in these lines at the top which doesnt help:
session_cache_expire(60);
session_set_cookie_params("9000","/","/");
session_start();

rehfeld

Originally posted by buducom
somebody else told me to check whether i mix domains/subdomains.

like duno.net www.duno.net etc.

so, do you or do you not mix subdomains? you better check carefully

and why did you need to make a new post? what was wrong w/ the thread you already started? you only hurting yourself because now other people cant see what was already said

buducom

no. I am not mixing them.

rehfeld

how long does it take for this to happen?

did you write all the php code?

is it possible the script is doing a session_destroy somewhere when it shouldnt(like for a logout button)

buducom

yes i wrote the code all myself.
It happens at different times.

If i am correct it happens a lot when i open another browser window and try to return to the session.
Any idea?

rehfeld

how long is different times?
1-2minutes? 5 days?

help us help you. give DETAILS.

if you close the browser, your browser will no longer send the session cookie to php. this is the normal and desired(usually) behavior of sessions.

sessions also expire after a while. you can set how long this is. details are in the manual. http://php.net/session
i think default is 180 min

there must be a pattern here, and you need to try to find it/them and report it to us. sessions do not fail randomly, although they may seem to in this case.

also, a suggestion for your website.
i tried browsing around for a while to see if i could find where the sessionid was changing, but it never did. anyway, looking at some of the member profiles, it can take a very long time for the images to download. your making thumbnails by just resizing the images. i would suggest using php's gd library to actually resize those huge images into smaller ones so that the pages load the thumbnails quickly. seems a lot of members are uploading pics 400-600k, which can take a while to download from your site.