Why are my PHP sessions timing out around 30 minutes?

Have been pulling out my hair trying to find out why my sessions are being terminated/killed/destroyed at 30 minutes. Well it looks like Debian based systems have a special cron running that ignores all php.ini and apache configurations and kills any idle session at 30 minutes.

The cron path: /etc/cron.d/php5

Inside the cron:


# /etc/cron.d/php5: crontab fragment for php5
# This purges session files older than X, where X is defined in seconds
# as the largest value of session.gc_maxlifetime from all your php.ini
# files, or 24 minutes if not defined. See /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime

# Look for and purge old sessions every 30 minutes
09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -n 200 -r -0 rm


/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime code

#!/bin/sh -e

max=1440

for ini in /etc/php5/*/php.ini; do
cur=$(sed -n -e 's/^[[:space:]]*session.gc_maxlifetime[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*\([0-9]\+\).*$/\1/p' $ini 2>/dev/null || true);
[ -z "$cur" ] && cur=0
[ "$cur" -gt "$max" ] && max=$cur
done

echo $(($max/60))

exit 0


so it looks to be searching all the php.ini files, finds the greatest value, compares it to 1440 (which is 24 minutes).

Here are the php.ini files

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

/etc/php5/cgi/php.ini
session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

/etc/php5/cli/php.ini
session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440


CRON running every 30 minutes is why the session looks to be killed at 30 minute intervals. But it could also be 24 to 54 minutes, FYI

Also looking over the code in: `/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime` it's taking the highest value and during my testing I was trying to lower the threshold to speed up the condition (this is why we were getting mixed results).

So to configure a higher number is easy, just configure one of the php.ini files, set session.gc_maxlifetime to a higher value than 1440 and you might want to also change the cron execution times.

If you wanted a lower number you would have to edit ALL the php.ini files on your system as welll as the /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime max= variable to the smaller number