How to troubleshoot $_SESSION?

Question

I'm having an issue on my website I can't seem to troubleshoot. The site has a login that works fine, but the site sporadically logs users out.

Steps: 1. Login

2. Use site (usually won't log you out right away)

3. Click on link (The links vary, doesn't seem to be isolated to a specific one)

4. Get logged out

The site has a 60-90 minute timer that is supposed to log people out, but for some reason I keep getting booted 5-30 minutes in. I have an MySQL_error function that reports errors but it doesn't report an error being present (otherwise I would post it). This error has been present for quite a while and I can't figure out how to troubleshoot it very well at all. I would be very grateful for any assistance!

All of my pages use $_SESSION like so....

if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) { insert page coding here }

Else it logs you out. I have noted this abnormality on multiple computers and I don't think it's based on my computer settings.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem once (see php $_SESSION variables disappear and reappear randomly ). It acted as if session variables would disappear randomly, and sometimes they also reappeared after some time.

I was eventually able to fix that problem by activating strict mode for sessions, adding this line right at the top of the page, above session_start(); :

ini_set('session.use_strict_mode', 0);