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I've googled around about this and what I know so far is that the session is destroyed when the browser is closed and if the browser is just kept open, the session automatically expires after a fixed amount of time like 24 minutes.

But when does the counter for these 24 minutes start? When the server executes the session_start() line? This question might be a little long but please bear with me. Assume i have a php page with this code in it:

<?php
      session_start();
?>

If a user open this page and just keeps it open for about an hour, will the session still expire although the page is still open? And if i add the session_start()code at the beginning of every page of my site, does the counter get reset to zero every time the user open a new page of the site?

Basically I want to make a login system that logs a user out when he closes the site or clicks the log out button and i want to keep him logged in as long as he has the site open, without him getting logged out automatically after 24 minutes or any other fixed time.

pale_rider
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    You could just change the session timeout: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8311320/how-to-change-the-session-timeout-in-php – George May 08 '14 at 08:25
  • If the user only needs to keep the page open, you will need to implement polling your server to keep the session alive. If the user does do some type of action, you can simply reset their counter on one of your PHP pages. – Dave Chen May 08 '14 at 08:26

1 Answers1

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The timing starts when the session is first created. After the 24 minutes, it might or might not be erased by the garbage collector as it randomly kicks in(see session.gc_* directives). What you want to do is regenerate the session every N minutes(session_regenerate_id()), so that it doesn't expire as long as the user is active.

Pepelotas
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