How can I increase the amount of time an administrator is logged in before Lime Survey requires them to log in again?
It's very frustrating having to sign in all the time.

This must be a problem with your server.

On my installations I can stay quite a bit iddle without being logged out. What do you mean with "times out too soon"?

I have never felt to be forced to log in too often.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

My precise issue is I am often I working with LimeSurvey, but I'll not interact with it for half an hour or so (working in other apps and tabs). When I return to LimeSurvey and select an action, e.g. clicking a link, I am forced to log in again. It seems like the session cookie expires far too quickly. On most other accounts, such as Google, I am logged in until I log out, but it's not the case with LimeSurvey, and I'd like to change it.

Is this unusual? How can I change it?

I am no expert in this, but I think this has nothing to do with Limesurvey, but with the php session of your webserver. So you probably will have to increase the php session time, I guess.

clix wrote: It seems like the session cookie expires far too quickly. On most other accounts, such as Google, I am logged in until I log out, but it's not the case with LimeSurvey, and I'd like to change it.

The session is controlled by php and saved as a file or in a database (depending on your settings in limesurvey). Default the session file is saved as a textfile in the session directory. The cookie PHPSESSID is only storing the sessionfile id, not the session data itself.

To change the lifetime of these sessions, you need to change or override the php.ini setting "session.gc_maxlifetime"
Default lifetime is 1440seconds. That means that the session is at least 1440 sec. long. The sessions are allowed to be destroyed by the garbagecollector. The gc_maxlifetime is a misleading name.

The whole session configuration in php is quite big.
php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php

But in most cases just raise gc_maxlifetime. Raising limits via the LimeSurvey config file can be done afterwards.