Some of the very things that made PHP seem so clever in 1999

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Some of the very things that made PHP seem so clever in 1999 now make it seem ugly. It was the first language really written just for the web, and it probably remains the best at allowing different configurations for different virtual hosts under Apache. But this can lead to problems:

The Ubuntu server running our web application was also running an additional application which did not always have the same PHP configuration. Apache is fully capable of this when using virtual hosts – the point is, the max life time changes were not done in any of the php.ini files. Despite of this, that is exactly were there is a clue to what was happening. The PHP version we are using is an Ubuntu/Debian package, which has some changes to the original PHP default setup. In all of the php.ini files, in the SESSION section just above the garbage collection probability setting, we found that the session garbage collection by default was actually turned off. The reason given is Debians strict permissions on the default session save path. Furthermore, the section informs that PHPs garbage collection has been replaced by a cron job.

A closer inspection of the cron job revealed this to be true, every half hour, it will look for a maxlifetime setting in all php.ini files it can find, see if it has found a value larger than its default of 24 minutes, and go on to delete all session files in the default session save path older than this value. In our case our maxlifetime settings were not in either of the ini files, which means the default value of 24 minutes was effective.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://elephpants.blog.linpro.no/2009/10/02/unwanted-end-of-sessions/
Source