Should we care about session timeout?

Someone in my team requesting that we extend session timeout for SharePoint to 4 hours so when he had to go to the washroom or take his lunch he should be worry about his session to be killed. I couldn't give answer to what is the importance of session time out feature -if I can call it feature-

Can someone educate me if there is any harm of expanding session time out from 30 minutes to 4 hours (besides that someone else can use your computer in your absence to access areas using your profile)

Thanks!

Mohamed

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Should we care about session timeout?

Daniel Beravi
Hi Ishai,

I found this thread while trying to understand a problem I'm having with session timeouts...

Sometimes, whether I log onto the Central Admin site, the SSP page, or a shared site I'm building for others, after 30 minutes (I think) I'm challenged to log in again. My problem is that after entering my un/pw, the log in popup keeps refreshing and wanting me to do it again. Frequently, I end up on the error page telling me I don't have permission to the page.

I'm the admin on the server as well as the SharePoint admin... Sometimes I have to close all open browsers and then try agai. Other times I've moved to a different computer to get back in.

Can you please point me in the right direction to:
1. Increase the sesssion time out (nothing's in production yet, so I'm not worried about performance. Yet...)
2. Understand why I'm getting this permissions issue
Thanks!
John

ps:
I looked at the blog you recommended, on mapping properties to list columns. Sweet! Catch here is my organization won't be rolling out the Office 2007 suite to desktops for a while. But I do have MOSS and Services 3.0 anyway.
MagedSalah

Mohamed,

I am not an expert on these issues, but guessing from what I know I would say this is also a resources problem. The more you expand timeouts, the more chance you have of people leaving open sessions, which means the server is wasting resources (memory) saving the session data for longer times. This may cause loss of preformance.

I have done some small research and found many referances that say that to get good preformance you should "Set the session time-out value as low as possible", and I also found the following KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815159

that says "Each session consumes memory. Therefore, if you reduce the session time-out, you may improve performance if the session uses a large quantity of memory, and a significant number of sessions are active. Monitor the Working Set counter to measure the impact that session time-out has on memory consumption."

In short - if you do what that person asks, you may slow the server for all users!
Should we care about session timeout?

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