Debian based systems Session killed at 30 minutes in special cron, how to override?

Question

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

Answer 1

It's right there in your php5 cronjob fragment:

Look for and purge old sessions every 30 minutes

It doesn't matter the script purges 24 minute old sessions, if the script isn't executed more than every 30 minutes :)

Answer 2

Edit the file /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime

The value should be in seconds. This file will actually also check your php.ini so I don't know why it wasn't working for you.

Answer 3

You can provide your own session path session.save_path OR use a different handler altogether session.save_handler

You'll however need to provide appropriate mechanism for managing unwanted session files.

Found this in my php.ini

; NOTE: If you are using the subdirectory option for storing session files
;       (see session.save_path above), then garbage collection does *not*
;       happen automatically.  You will need to do your own garbage
;       collection through a shell script, cron entry, or some other method.
;       For example, the following script would is the equivalent of
;       setting session.gc_maxlifetime to 1440 (1440 seconds = 24 minutes):
;          cd /path/to/sessions; find -cmin +24 | xargs rm

I recently ran into this problem where unwanted session files were accumulating because I was using PHP and mod_fcgid with a custom session.save_path for each virtualhost.

Answer 4

This is a question for serverfault.com.

However, change session.gc_maxlifetime in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini or - if you don't have an apache2 one - one of the other /etc/php5/*/php.ini files. The script /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime will then use the maximum for that setting found in any of those files.

Editing maxlifetime won't help or at least only until the php5-common package is updated again.

Answer 5

Use below cron to delete unused sessions.

39 20     * * *     root   [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -r -0 rm

Answer 6

If you came here because your cron is throwing errors every 30 Minutes (at 09 and 39) you may have simmilar errors in your syslog and/or mailbox:

[ -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
PHP Fatal error: Directive 'allow_call_time_pass_reference' is no longer available in PHP in Unknown on line 0

The reason for this maybe that you upgraded your Debian to Wheezy and you have old entrys in your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.

I had to comment out the following lines and the errors vanished.

• allow_call_time_pass_reference
• register_long_arrays

Im writing this because this is one of the top google results if you search for the error-messages and it may affect many users/admins who maintained thier debian-installations for more than one release.

PS: This helped me very much: http://vernontbludgeon.com/blog/archives/2013/10/debian-php-session-garbage-collection-maxlifetime-fails-when-php.ini-has-obsolete-directives.html