Topic on Project:Support desk

Was a permission issue on the session folder

I use MediaWiki on my desktop (running 64bit Mageia Linux) as my personal documentation repository (or kbase). I am the only user who accesses the wiki, and I access it from both my Linux host and a Win7 VM. This configuration has worked perfectly for several years, including through multiple distro-hops.

My latest change installed a new version of MediaWiki, which broke the PHP timeout. Under previous versions, I could override the timeout so that an editing session could last for an entire 8-5 workday without timing out.

I've already changed the following settings, which have not helped:

session.gc_maxlifetime = 28800

session.cache_expire = 500

session.cookie_lifetime = 0

How do I increase the PHP timeout to 8 or 9 hours?

Here is my version info:

MediaWiki	1.24.1
PHP	5.5.25 (apache2handler)
MariaDB	5.5.43-MariaDB

With PHP timeout do you mean session timeout? That is, you get logged-out very frequently?

You could look in the server, having a known active session, check the session file on the server, and see if when the session gets lost, the file is really there. That would be odd, but maybe there's a cron job set up to clean old session files that hasn't been touched in the last x hours.

Another possibility is that you have another application on the same server, and your cookie configuration shares the same cookie path and name. If you access a page of the other application, it may automatically logout you.

Yes, I meant session timeout.

The problem was the authority to my custom temp directory. I don't remember if I changed the temp directory while troubleshooting this problem, or if I changed it ages ago. Once I fixed the authority to that directory, the increased timeout was used.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.