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Do PHP sessions timeout by default - ie without any coding on my part would a user eventually be "logged out" after some time of inactivity?

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  • 1
    Thanks for all those. I wanted a little more straight forward answer hence the question! - upvoted Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 9:06
  • 7
    Amusing how all the answers mention "20 minutes" and "1440 seconds" and no one bothered to notice that 1440 seconds is in fact 24 minutes. Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 8:55

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
139

It depends on the server configuration or the relevant directives session.gc_maxlifetime in php.ini.

Typically the default is 24 minutes (1440 seconds), but your webhost may have altered the default to something else.

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3 Comments

Would like to know why 1440 sec are default? ... stackoverflow.com/a/37176824/57091
Is it 1440 seconds after creation or after last activity ?
switch to 10800 (3h), connect, no activity during more than 2 hours, then test with click a link… it works
20

You can change it in you php-configuration on your webserver. Search in php.ini for

session.gc_maxlifetime() The value is set in Seconds.

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12

Yes, that's usually happens after 1440s (24 minutes)

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@Mani When is 1440 seconds 20 minutes?
6

http://php.net/session.gc-maxlifetime

session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440
(1440 seconds = 24 minutes)
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6

You can set the session time out in php.ini. The default value is 1440 seconds

session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

; 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):
;          find /path/to/sessions -cmin +24 -type f | xargs rm
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5

Yes typically, a session will end after 20 minutes in PHP.

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3 Comments

Do you mean 20 minutes of inactivity ?? or even if the user is active and keeping some sort of requests tot he site will the session expire ?
@rammanoj 20 minutes of inactivity.
1440 seconds is the default which is actually 24 minutes.

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