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Your LimeSurvey version:Version 3.27.9+210726
Own server or LimeSurvey hosting: UL Survey
Survey theme/template:UL_newcustom
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Hi,
my PhD student launched a survey. She got a message from one respondent saying that the survey suddenly closed, with a message "too much time".
Is anyone familiar with this? 
Thanks,
luc

I am not aware of a Limesurvey error message of "too much time". At least not this exact string.

However, if it is not exactly this string, it could be a session time out. The session time is set on your server, so after X amount of time (depending your setting), without any action in the survey (e.g. click next) the session will be deleted. So depending on this setting and the dedication (or lack thereof) of your respondents (e.g. getting up during the survey, doing other things, drinking a coffee, chatting with colleagues, etc.) it could happen that the session time runs out.

How do you distribute the survey? Is it an open survey? Then the answers given before are "lost". Well, they are not really lost, but you can't start over from this point, the data is stored in the database as partially answered.

If you use a closed survey, with tokens, the respondent just needs to click on the link again and will restart from the last page that was saved in the database (of course not working for surveys in "all in one" mode, the answers in this case are only stored once the survey is submitted).

Solutions (if this is really due to a session timeout):

• Increase session time setting on the server (usually defined in PHP settings, not a Limesurvey issue). Might not be possible because you do not have access to the server settings and the person responsible for this installation might not be willing to change the setting (I assume this is a university installation, also because of the lack of updates...)
• Tell the respondents not to stop for long during the survey. This might not be possible. E.g. if your survey requires a respondent to watch a video of 20 minutes and your session time out is set to 10 Minutes, this of course won't help, because the respondents can't watch a 20 minute video in 10 minutes.
• Use a closed survey with token links. This way the error will appear, but the respondents can restart at the last saved question.

Off topic:

Version 3.27.9+210726

You are running a version of Limesurvey that was released 0n 26/07/2021. This means that your installation hasn't received a single update, bug fix or security patch for over 2 years now. I don't know where you are from, but most countries have strict data protection laws (e.g. GDPR in the EU). So I highly recommend to update the installation at least to the latest version of LS 3.x.

Thank you for your answer. I will look into it...
Unfortunately, we got another one.. writing: "I have tried the survey and after two pages of meaningful comments (about 35’ if thinking and typing) it timed me out…"

Ok, so your survey doesn't seem to be a typical survey with short questions and a question by question approach, but rather require respondents to write long texts and think about it. Of course this can easily cause people to run in a session time out.

The default in PHP seems usually to be 24 minutes (1440 seconds). So if the respondent was sitting and thinking on one page for more than 24 minutes, it is highly likely that the session timed out.

So the best is to have short tasks on different pages of the survey, rather than having long or several tasks on one page. Usually 24 minutes is a long time for a normal survey, where questions usually can be answered in a relatively short time and usually you have 1 or only a few short questions on one page.

But if this survey has long tasks, or many tasks on one page, that require respondents to think a lot, look things up, write long answers, it is possible to run into the session limit.

Remember, the session limit is renewed with each "action" in the survey. An action would be clicking the next button. The server does not notice when people are clicking within the same page or are writing. So the respondents have up to 24 minutes (or whatever the setting in your php.ini is) until the need to click the "next" or "submit" button to go to the next page.

This is not directly a Limesurvey issue, but rather a server configuration issue.

Any chance that you can give us access to this survey (or send an LSS)? So that we can have a look at the structure?

two pages of meaningful comments

By the way, if you look into the table with the answers, you should at least find the "first page of meaningful comments" of this respondent, the second page is probably lost, if they did not click the next button within the session time limit (probably 24 minutes).