Re: Destroying session data

On Dec 23, 2004, at 3:40 PM, John Holmes wrote:

From: Philip Thompson <prthomp@uark.edu>

On Dec 23, 2004, at 2:59 PM, Matt M. wrote:

this might be coming into play: http://us4.php.net/session session.gc_maxlifetime integer

    session.gc_maxlifetime specifies the number of seconds after which

data will be seen as 'garbage' and cleaned up.

Okay, lemme see if I understand how it works. Even if it "sees" it as garbage, it will not destroy it until the session has ended? or will destroy when that time is reached? So can I set session.gc_maxlifetime to be a low number (e.g., 10 seconds) and it will still behave appropriately? Currently, it's set to the default - 1440.

The gc_maxlifetime setting controls how "old" files can be before the garbage collection process deletes them, when it's actually started. This is why your file system must support atime as mentioned before. If the file has not been accessed in over 1440 seconds (by default) then if the garbage collection process is started, it'll be deleted. Like I said in my other post, though, there's only a 1% chance of the garbage collection process being started (by default). These old files you see are probably there because you don't have enough traffic to trigger garbage collection or your using a file system that doesn't support atime. ---John Holmes...

Thanks to all for your assistance. I'm pretty sure I understand it at least 1% better! =P Thanks, ~Philip