[imp] Sessions and php.ini

[Nigel Cass]

Hi everyone.

Our webmail implementation has been wonderfully well received since last
September. However as you might expect there are just the occasional quirky
questions from quirky users :)

One such user swears that she is never away from her webmail session for
longer than an hour (looking thru the logs kind of backs this up - but not
quite....) but that she gets problems with session expiration.

My php.ini settings that I consider relevant are.

session.cookie_lifetime = 0
session.gc_probability = 1
session.gc_maxlifetime = 12600

So we're using session cookies for the lifetime of the browser (means a
browser restart if your session expires under you - but I can live with
that.) and we're saying that after three and a half hours session data can
be considered garbage.

My question for the php experts is this (and I have looked thoroughly at the
php site and a couple of books and it's not clear) does
session.gc_maxlifetime have any concept of idle time or does it simply say
after this much time you can junk it whether idle or not ? - A lot of posts
to the mailing list suggest that it's idle time that matters. However
reading the actual description of the setting doesn't suggest that is
necessarily the case. If not what is the setting for idle time ?

TYIA

Nigel.