Symfony calls the PHP garbage collector on Ubuntu

Question

As the title state for some reason my Symfony 2.5 Application is calling the php garbage collector even when all of my php.ini files have:

session.gc_probability = 0

Does anyone know how to prevent this from happening?

Error message im getting:

Notice: SessionHandler::gc(): ps_files_cleanup_dir: opendir(/var/lib/php5)
failed: Permission denied (13) in /<path-to-my-site>/var/cache/dev/classes.php line 432 

FROM PHPINFO():

Directive               Local Value   Master Value
session.gc_divisor      1000          1000
session.gc_maxlifetime  86400         86400
session.gc_probability  0             0

I know that i can just give the www-data user permission to the /var/lib/php5 folder or change the session.save_path to somewhere that the www-data user has access to already but i want to know why this process is even getting called when it should be disabled.

Answer 1

You can set path for sessions manually. See Symfony doc on sessions directory.

# app/config/config.yml
framework:
    session:
        handler_id: session.handler.native_file
        save_path: '%kernel.root_dir%/sessions'

Answer 2

I found it, I guess the latest version of symfony is overwriting this by default when using the app_dev.php. The Symfony FrameworkBundle is setting the session.gc_probability = 1.

As of Symfony 3

However, some operating systems do their own session handling and set the session.gc_probability variable to 0 to stop PHP doing garbage collection. That's why Symfony now overwrites this value to 1.

If you wish to use the original value set in your php.ini, add the following configuration:

# config.yml
framework:
    session:
        gc_probability: null

https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_foundation/session_configuration.html#configuring-garbage-collection

Previous 2.x versions

To change this add the following to your config.yml

framework:
    session:
        gc_probability: 0

Then clear the dev cache

php app/console cache:clear

This is where it shows the gc_probability defaulted to 1. Why they dont just read from the php.ini settings im not sure.

http://symfony.com/doc/2.5/reference/configuration/framework.html#gc-probability