session expiretime

Hello I am trying to figure out how long a session survives, if the user does nothing in his or her browser, to update the session. I'm creating a rather comprehensive signup-process, and I need to know how much time a user can spend on each page, before the session expires. Looking through php.ini left me somewhat confused, as I can't determine which of the following parameters control sessiontimeouts. session.cookie_lifetime = 0 ; lifetime in seconds of cookie ; or if 0, until browser is restarted Apparantly this just controls the cookies lifetime, however, if the GC-process cleans up the sessions before the cookie times out, obviously the session will be destroyed. As far as I can see, the gc-process is controlled by this directive: session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440 ; after this number of seconds, stored ; data will be seen as 'garbage' and ; cleaned up by the gc process So, does this mean that the session will persist for 1440 seconds, with the above directives inserted in php.ini? Thanks in advance. -- Søren O.