Increase Session Timeout

karletherobot

I just installed PHP5 on a Windows server with XP SP2 and Apache 2. I am having a problem with the sessions timing out after about 30 seconds or so. I need to increase this to at least 20 minutes. The session directives are still set to the default configuration in php.ini.

session.gc_probability = 1
session.gc_divisor = 1000
session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

Any idea why the sessions are timing out so quickly? Any other settings I should be looking at?

greensweater

session.cookie_lifetime? from the docs:

Note: The expiration timestamp is set relative to the server time, which is not necessarily the same as the time in the client's browser.

if you're setting it with a timestamp you must take into account the timezone.

karletherobot

Thanks for the reply.

Currently session.cookie_lifetime = 300. Should this be 0?

Where should I get the browser timestamp to compare it to the server timestamp?

greensweater

Your cookie timeout is only 10 minutes so if there is a 9.5min discrepancy between the browser and server, this would account for the timeout.

If you really want to get complicated, you could populate a hidden formfield via javascript using something like

var dt = new Date();
var gmt = dt.toGMTString();

... or some such (google it), so the server can know what time it is on the client... but, you're probably better off setting the timeout to 0 (default setting) so that it expires when the browser closes.