Hello,

we're getting reports from people completing their surveys that their session is timing out on them - they get a "session has expired" message when they click Submit.

This seems to be happening since our upgrade to 1.91 build 11804 a few weeks back.

Apologies if this is a newbie question, but is their a timeout setting in a config file somewhere that we can change, or might there be another issue causing this ?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions,

Peter McCaskell
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Hello,

session timeouts can have several reasons. The first thing I would check is the "Session lifetime (seconds):" option in the global settings "General" view. If this value is too low participants might run into this problem. It might even be a problem with the configuration of you webserver, e.g. if your webserver overrides this the seession lifetime. We also experienced this timeout occurs if you disable or block the LimeSurvey cookies though I don't think it is the problem if it worked fine before the upgrade.

You said you upgraded to LimeSurvey 1.91 build 11804 (I think you mean 1.91+ build 11804) but it would be interessting to know from which version you upgraded. Perhaps there might be complications with the upgrade, you could for example do a clean installation of an actual stable version (LimeSurvey 1.91+ build 12170) and test if this solves your problem.

1. Are there several pages at your survey?

2. How large is the survey?

3. Please upload a phpinfo file so we can take a look at your server configuration. Just put the following code into a file named phpinfo.php and upload it to your webserver: (Delete the spaces next to </> when copying the code.)
After uploading please post the link to the file.

Thank you very much Mazi and Vierundzwanzig for your replies - really appeciated !

I've passed on your suggestions to our system folks here who look after our LimeSurvey installation. They'll check to see if the web server is set to a lower session lifetime than our LimeSurvey configuration setting, and I will be back in touch with the URL of the phpinfo file Mazi requested. I've also asked them to do an upgrade to the latest release: 1.91+ Build 12170. Hopefully something in this list of activities will fix our problem.

Our Global Settings / Session Lifetime (Seconds) value is set at 36000 (i.e. 10 hours) but if the respondent doesn't do anything for about 45 minutes, they get the Session Timeout Error message when they click "Next" or "Submit". We're seeing this happen for any surveys regardless of size or display format setting (i.e. display set at: show all questions at once, show questions group by group, or show question by question). Cookies are allowed in the respondents' browsers .

Unfortunately I can't remember what version we upgraded from, but it was 1.91+ with the build (as I recall) in the 8000 range.

Thanks again for your help. I'll be back in touch once I have more information from our systems people here at Guelph.

Best wishes,
Peter

guelphpeter wrote: Our Global Settings / Session Lifetime (Seconds) value is set at 36000 (i.e. 10 hours) but if the respondent doesn't do anything for about 45 minutes, they get the Session Timeout Error message when they click "Next" or "Submit". We're seeing this happen for any surveys regardless of size or display format setting (i.e. display set at: show all questions at once, show questions group by group, or show question by question).

Such application based settings can always be overruled by webserver settings so this might be a good first start to check and increase the according value.

Hello Mazi, and thanks again for taking a look at this.

The phpinfo file you requested is here:

surveys.ccs.uoguelph.ca/limeSurvey/phpinfo.php


As well, our systems folks asked me to pass along the output of a grep command
they thought might also be helpful to you. It's below.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer Mazi,

Best wishes,
Peter

[root@pessoa limeSurvey]# grep -i sessionlife /var/www/html/surveys/limeSurvey/*
/var/www/html/surveys/limeSurvey/config-defaults.php:// $sessionlifetime sets how long until a survey session expires in seconds
/var/www/html/surveys/limeSurvey/config-defaults.php:$sessionlifetime = 3600;
/var/www/html/surveys/limeSurvey/index.php:@ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', $sessionlifetime);

Hello,

There are a lot of "security parameter" on server removing session file with sh script.

Maybe you can test with
$sessionhandler = 'db';

Shnoulle, which security modules are you referring to?

The suggestion to switch to Db based session might help, so please give it a try by adding this line to your config.php file:
$sessionhandler = 'db';

Hello. I set the limesurvey global settings Session lifetime (seconds):36000 (10 hours). I noticed that in my server (ubuntu) the session.gc_maxlifetime=1440 (24 minutes). So should i change the session.gc_maxlifetime to 36000 (10 hours)?
Is there anything else that i should change (regarding my server) for the session not to timeout?

I cannot see that setting in Global Settings > General. The options are Site name, Default template, Default HTML editor mode, Template editor, Time difference (in hours), Server time, Google Maps API key, Google Analytics API key, and Google Translate API key.

Has the Session Timeout setting been removed or just moved somewhere else? This is running Version 2.05+ Build 140302

Have a look at the manual - "Session lifetime: Defines the time in seconds after which a survey session expires (provided there is no action from the participant). This setting is NOT available when using default file-based sessions."

- www.limesurvey.org/manual/Global_settings#General
- www.limesurvey.org/manual/Optional_settings#Session_settings

In my case it was sufficient to change /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini :
session.gc_maxlifetime = 21600

21600 is the lifetime value I set in seconds.

Restart apache to activate new setting : service apache2 restart

I had no setting within Limesurvey for this.