I did do a quick test on that the next day and it seemed to be roughly working for me.

@dgt41 do you have any ideas on this?

i didnt think you got out of bed the next day

I can use a laptop from a sofa ;)

So seriously I tried setting timeout to 2 minutes and 5 minutes and hung around and it seemed to expire at the right time and not expire before that.

But is the keepalive script keeping it alive beyond the session timeout when it is supposed to?

Probably https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/4.0-dev/media/system/js/keepalive.js#L21
should be more specific like

keepaliveInterval = keepaliveOptions.interval ? parseInt(keepaliveOptions.interval) : 45 * 1000;

it just logged me out while i was doing a form search

It's actually not the keepalive. It's the session in general which doesn't get refreshed.
To reproduce:

• Set sesssion lifetime to 1 minute
• Do stuff for one minute. Even randomly clicking things will get you logged out after that minute.

Umm, I have that behavior also in staging. Is that new? I thought a page reload used to reset the session lifetime? Now it works again after I closed the browser. I have no clue ?

Update:
I've been playing with this a bit more and I agree with Thomas - I logged the responses of the javascript keepalive. Set a session time of two minutes (which mean the session refreshes every 1 minute). The first keepalive returned good. the second returned a 403 (because i no longer had permission to access the backend because my session had timed out :( )

I am wondering if it is related to the session handler. I have noticed lots of session******.php files

OK. I've literally spent days figuring this out. And it's a one line fix (of course). #17623