Session logout problems

[eluser]Dan Allen[/eluser]
[quote author="Dan Allen" date="1328901581"]The action of deleting the session records from the DB may have been caused by a combination of too much time on $sess_time_to_update leading to deletion of the record by the garbage collection function. The apparent random occurrence of the logging out would be explained by the random function controlling the frequency of when the garbage collection function is executed.
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MORE ABOUT FAILURE SEQUENCE AT OUR SITE - WHY RANDOM TIMING?
Session time out was not causing the random logout. Instead, the session would just keep running, even though time had expired. That is because of the imbalanced configuration values were causing checks for expiration to fail (not logout when session time has run out).

The user logout comes when garbage collection comes by to delete expired ci_session records in the database. GC spots expired records, deletes them, knocking the user to the login screen.

The reason the timing appears random, is garbage collection (GC) runs on a schedule that includes a php rand() function. When GC is called, it runs only if rand() generates a number within a certain range.