What you may notice if you’re developing with Plone/Zope, is that if you’re storing small pieces of data within Plone’s session variable (the session_data_manager tool), data expires after a few minutes. By default, this timeout is 20 minutes, but is far too short if you’re expecting the information stored to last for say the whole time a user is logged in. In this situation, you’ll need to increase the timeout.
Documentation on changing the session timeout is potentially a little sketchy (Google “session-timeout-minutes zope”), but it’s clear that you need to change the session-timeout-minutes directive in your zope.conf.
What’s not immediately obvious is how to make a session persist indefinitely (until server reboot), but this can be achieved by setting the value to 0. Within a buildout environment for Plone, adding this under your Plone’s instance section will add the configuration to your zope.conf.
[instance] ... zope-conf-additional = session-timeout-minutes 0
There are obviously implications for performance and other issues associated with persisting session data like this, but for arguments sake, let’s say we’ve considered them. You’ll probably also want to consider deleting session data stored like this on logout (see Session Variables in the Plone collective documentation) but that’s dependant on your use case.
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