I'm trying to set up the server to increase the lifetime session to 2 hours to be able to save surveys (Limesurvey) after some time of inactivity. If I try to save after 45 minutes it shows up an error message saying that the session has expired.

I have been reading a lot to find solutions but what I have found so far, didn't work. Probably because I'm missing something.

This is what I have:

Plesk 12.5.30
Limesurvey 2.06+ Build 150831
PHP 5.3.10

The settings in config-defaults.php (Limesurvey) have:

$config 'iSessionExpirationTime' = 7200;

2 hours which is ok, is what I want but does not work. So I thought that my server settings were overriding the Limesurvey settings. So I went to plesk > domains, selected my domain and clicked on PHP settings, scrolled down and added to the "additional instructions" these two lines:

session.cookie_lifetime = 7200
session.gc_maxlifetime = 7200

So now all my additional instructions looks like this:

max_input_vars = 5000
suhosin.memory_limit = 128
suhosin.post.max_value_length = 5000000
suhosin.post.max_vars = 5000
suhosin.request.max_value_length = 5000000
suhosin.request.max_vars = 5000
suhosin.simulation = 1
session.cookie_lifetime = 7200
session.gc_maxlifetime = 7200

But it didn't work anyways, I'm still having the same error when trying to save a survey when 45 minutes have elapsed.

Any help would be great.

Thanks a lot.

Hi,

There is something elese in Plesk for session somewhere. But we are not Plesk specialist.

Limesurvey don't trye to manage session lifetime if session is not set in Database.

LimeSurvey solution : use Sessioon DB (se config.php).

Denis

Hi,

Thanks for the answer but I would prefer to try modifying the php.ini files. I have been researching and asked in different forums about my problem, some people gave me some advices that I followed related to a cronjob that clean sessions after some time, so I edited it to increase the value to 7200 but still no luck.

I do not understand well this behavior because it works but not as expected, for example, when I start a survey and leave it inactive for 1 hour and 50 minutes (I have the session for 2 hours now, before it was by default 24 minutes) and try to save, it works as expected. But then, when I leave it for another hour and try to save, it display the error saying that the session expired. So I dont understand why, shoulnt it restart from 0 when I saved the first time?

It must be
I dont have answer here