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Making PHP session expire (in Drupal and in general)

Sun, 2011.11.20 - 22:04 — müzso
http://www.rymland.org/en/blogs/boaz/2_jan_09/making-php-session-expire-drupal-a...
(...) Modern Linux distro's, say Ubuntu (8.10) comes with a default PHP configuration of session.gc_probability = 0. This means that in general, session GC will never run(!). There is a unix cron job that runs every half hour and checks for old sessions to delete (see more at /etc/cron.d/php5) but this is done only if you're using the standard "files" as your session handler (check out the directive of session.save_handler on your machine to learn what php default sessions handler is but make sure to check that your application doesn't overwrite this), so for Drupal users using plain Debian/Ubuntu, stock LAMP packages and stock Drupal applications, this means that the PHP garbage collection, despite your best intentions, will also never run. (...)

My preferred method to solve the issue of PHP's GC never being invoked is the use of the session_expire module.