Setting session timeout in Glassfish

People complained that their sessions timed-out too quickly in Glassfish.

I checked and it is set to 30 minutes (default 1800 seconds), just a tad too little.

Increased it to 2 hours (7200 seconds).

Just went to Configurations - Web Container - Session Properties - Session Timeout.

It changes the domain.xml:

<session-properties timeout-in-seconds="7200"></session-properties>

Problem

Of course, this completely and utterly failed to work in my case.

It turns out I already had a session timeout specified in the web.xml.

<session-config>
  <session-timeout>
    30
  </session-timeout>
</session-config>

The session timeout in the web.xml is specified in minutes.

You can also specify it in the glassfish-web.xml file.¹

<session-config>
    <session-properties>
        <property name="timeoutSeconds" value="600"/>
        <property name="enableCookies" value="false"/>
    </session-properties>
</session-config>

Precedence

You do need to check which setting takes precedence in your application. It's not clear from the documentation.

References

[1] Glassfish 4.0 Application Deployment Guide

https://glassfish.java.net/docs/4.0/application-deployment-guide.pdf

iT Geek Help - Glassfish web container tuning settings

http://itgeekhelp.blogspot.nl/2009/03/glassfish-web-container-tuning-settings.html

StackOverflow - How to set session timeout in glassfish-web.xml configuration file?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33067985/how-to-set-session-timeout-in-glassfish-web-app-glassfish-web-xml-configurat