Every 15 minutes some reason session expire and redirect to login page

Question

I have this in my code but it does not seem to have any affect on the server. I set session gc_maxlifetime time 4 hours but it does not work. Every 15 minutes it redirects to the login page.

What can I change to avoid unexpected session expiration? In Local it works fine but on the server it create problem.

    ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);
    ini_set('session.gc_divisor', 100);
    ini_set('session.cookie_secure', FALSE);
    ini_set('session.use_only_cookies', TRUE);
    ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime',14400);   //4 hour          
    setcookie("_lid", $lid, time() + 14400);

    //set cokkies expiretime
    $sessionCookieExpireTime=8*60*60;
    session_set_cookie_params($sessionCookieExpireTime);

Answer 1

The problem is that the session garbage collection is done via a cronjob under /etc/cron.d/php or /etc/crontab .

This is set to every 30 minutes afaik.

Change it to 0 */4 * * * to let it do its job every 4 hours.

The cronjob looks like:

09,39 *     * * *     root   [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -delete

To advertise my personal opinion, I'd install memcached server and use it as your session handler. It's faster and better to control without a cronjob deleting your files.