I have a PHP apache application, running with ZendFramework 2 (old-school I know, but we are migrating to newer tech). Previously the PHP version was 5.6, and the session was persistent for 10 days (we configured it to be that long) We do not want our users to log out, even after 3 days away from computer. But when we upgraded to PHP 7.4, the session is being lost after approximately 1 hour.

At first, I expected it to be a garbage collection configuration. So I change the PHP.ini file to have session.gc_maxlifetime to 864000 (10 days) that should do the trick, but the session is still deleted after ~1 hour. I looked via SSH the session folder, and I can see that the older file is 1 hour and 3 minutes old, there is no file much older than 1 hour, I checked that folder multiple times.

My current PHP info is:
PHP INFO

My PHP apache application is hosted on AWS EC2 machine. When we upgraded from PHP 5.6 to 7.4, we rebuilt the EC2 machine from scratch, just copying the same files and configs of PHP and apache.

If there is any extra info that may be useful to solve this issue, please let me know.

TLDR: After PHP update from 5.6 to 7.4, previous session lifetime configuration turned itself useless for no apparent reason (or one I just can’t find after hours of debugging).

When I log in on my PHP application and wait for 1 hour, without any refresh, or even without the browser open, I expect the session to still be alive, for at least 10 days of inactivity. So the user could log in, in one day, and in the next day, his session must still be active.

But, after updating to PHP 7.4, what started to happen is: the session is expiring after approximately 1 hour. Then, if I let the browser open for about 1:30h and then refreshed, I am logged out.

When checking the sessions folder, on the EC2 Machine, I can see that there is not a file much older than 1 hour.