Extending the Session in PHP with gc_maxlifetime not working

Question

I have the following code to extend my $_SESSION[] variables. They expire after around 2-3 hours.

I tried to extend to 22h by changing the session.gc_maxlifetime, but im still losing my session after a couple of hours.

//start sessions
ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 60*60*22); // 22h - one day

//Output just to make sure config was changed.
echo ini_get("session.gc_maxlifetime"); 

session_start();

How do I increase the duration of my session?

Answer 1

Yes, it could be: session.cookie_lifetime which by default is 0, meaning terminate on closing of browser.

If you close your client and open it again session.gc_maxlifetime doesn't matter--it only applies to non-terminated sessions.

Or, you may have calles session start somewhere else earlier, with a smaller session.gc_maxlifetime. Often frameworks set this. Repeat calls to session start do nothing to alter the session.

Answer 2

Try to change it in the php.ini ! As session lifetime is a filesystem thing, a per-script set up is always problematical.

Answer 3

There's a note on the manual page about this; if another script using the same directory to store session data doesn't have the maxlifetime set, it'll use the shorter value instead.