having difficulties making sessions not expire

KptKremlin

I've searched around in the posts some and haven't quite found an answer i'm looking for.

On the top of the page, i'm doing the following:

<?
$lifetime = 60 * 60 * 24 * 14;
$path = '/stest/'
$domain = $myip;
session_set_cookie_params($lifetime,$path,$domain);
ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime',$lifetime);
session_start();
if ($_GET["h"])
 $_SESSION["test"]  = $_GET["h"];

echo $_SESSION["test"];
?>

so basically i see my test text that i'm passing with a GET string for maybe 30 minutes, then when i refresh it dissapears. I'm working on a few applications that would greatly benefit from not having the users' session data destroyed.

when i check in /var/lib/php4 for the session files, i see that they have dissapeared after this timeframe also.

So far as i can tell the session parameters are being set correctly since my session data does exist at all (ie not a wrong path or domain).

Does anyone have any ideas on what i can do to get these sessions to not evaporate into thin air?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

ednark

Remeber to check session.cookie_lifetime also

and I don't think that setting the session.gc_maxlifetime manually in only one script will matter, as when session garbage collection is initiated im pretty sure it takes what the current scripts session.gc_maxlifetime is, which will be different. Also I'm not sure about this but manually setting this variable via ini_set may not work since im not sure whether session initialization triggers garbage collection or if it happens at the end or even the beginning of each script. So it may fire off before you ini_set is called.

KptKremlin

Thanks for the reply Ednark,

the lifetime is definately long enough, so something else is happening.

I'll look into this and post any solutions i find.

KptKremlin

We are running debian, so the max session cookie lifetime is defined in a file that is referenced by a crontab for the garbagecleaner to run.

So to solve this, since we need to move our session cookies to a shared space anyway ( to help with transferring between secure and non-secure pages ), we are simply moving our session directory to a shared space, and not changing the crontab (since the crontab would most likely be updated and replaced by a future install of php anyway).

Thanks for the advice, i'll know if this works in 30 minutes 😛