sessions and time-outs

timbr8ks

I have an education application that includes an essay. The application keeps track of the students with sessions, but they seem to be spending a great deal of time typing up the essay. This means that the site picks up no activity for what appears to be hours.

Within my php.ini file, session.cache_expire is set to 180. I assume that this means the session will not expire for 3 hours. So, if they click anything within 3 hours, they're fine. If they spend more than 3 hours writing the essay, they lose it when they hit enter.

What can I do on this page to extend the session? Is it just a matter of changing 180 to 360 in my php.ini file? Can I use sessions_cache_expire to override what's in the .ini file? And what is session_cache_limiter(), and how does it affect things?

The thing is, all I really care about is giving students sufficent time to write their essays. Frankly, I'm not sure what "cache" has to do with anything. I don't care if the browser remembers the page; I just don't want the session to die.

I've done a great deal of reading on this issue, and I'm just not getting it. I'm hoping someone can help me figure it out.

Thanks in advance, and my apologies if I'm being ignorant about something. It comes with being self-taught.

Define-web_com

oum.. not sure if you already checked this post or not try this one.. http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10307325&highlight=session+timeout

daarius

if for some reason your cache is expiring, and you cant increase its expire time limit. then on submit, as you will have the values in $_POST, check the session first, if its expired, restart it again, and then carry on with your process. hope you understod.

timbr8ks

I'm not sure what Daarius means. As for Define-Web's link, it refers to session.cookie_lifetime, which defaults to 0. This means the session cookie lasts until the browser closes. However, this does not resolve the issue, as the browser is open the entire time.

The question is: how do you extend the life of the session so that someone who spends over 3 hours writing an essay doesn't get bumped out?

Weedpacket

I think you'll want to also want to look at session.gc_maxlifetime; cache_expire specifies time-to-live for cached pages. More details about the various session-control configuration directives are on the [man]session[/man] manual page.