My PHP session variables are destroyed when form doesn't submit for 20+ mins

Question

On our lab's laptop with Linux Mint we installed Apache server. It's sole purpose is to run our chemical script INDEX.PHP. Everything runs smoothly but there is one problem. If we don't submit from the script's form for 20 mins or more then the script's session variables are destroyed. But when we submit e.g. each 5 minutes everything is OK again. How to protect session variables from being destroyed. The script's code doesn't destroy these variables itself.

Answer 1

You might want to check your (for example) /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini for timeout settings. I found session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440 in my default setup, which is very close to your 20 minutes.

Path to your php.ini might be different, as your environment is unknown.