PHP/Wordpress Session Configuration

Question

I'm trying to integrate a quiz/survey plugin with an existing Wordpress site. Everything is working well, except that if the user lets a quiz/survey sit idle for awhile (30 minutes is long enough to trigger it) they will be greeted with the following error message when trying to submit their reply:

PHP Sessions error. Check your sessions settings.

I did as the error message suggests and checked my PHP session settings. More specifically, I edited the server's php.ini file and set the session timeout to two hours. I thought that would have done the trick, but when I tested again I got the same issue after 30 minutes of inactivity.

So my questions are:

1. Does Wordpress maintain a session that is different than the one that PHP maintains? If so how is it configured?
2. Is php.ini the correct place to be configuring my session settings?
3. Has anyone seen this error before, and if so, what was the solution?

Answer 1

I had the same issue,

I fixed it by making sure /var/lib/php/session folder was set 0777 for permissions, deleted all the session files and did a graceful restart of the server.

Sessions messages went away and voting worked.