Session garbage collection

PHP's garbage collection for sessions is controlled by session.gc_probability, session.gc_divisor, and session.gc_maxlifetime in php.ini. Generally, these can also be set in .htaccess, httpd.conf, via ini_set(), or, since PHP 5.3, in .user.ini.

However, many Linux configurations actually disable this by setting session.gc_probability to 0, then use a cron job or some other method to cleanup the default location for PHP sessions based on the session.gc_maxlifetime value. While this has the benefit of not triggering session cleanup specifically when a user visits the site, you would have to modify the existing cron job or create a new one to cleanup your session location, or use the default session location (generally stored in session.save_path).

If you use a session driver other than the file driver, it's a little more difficult to clean up the old sessions by doing anything other than setting the session.gc_* variables to reasonable values.

Thanks for that!

So this could mean that my local machine is not collecting the garbage, but my hosting server could be doing it correctly.