Why does my Netbeans Xdebug session timeout after

Question

I love the way the Netbeans helps me to debug my Magento applications (in XAMPP on Win 7 64-bit), but I've noticed that the connection seems to timeout after a period. The breakpoints no longer get hit and I have to restart the debugging session which is annoying. Any suggestions for how to extend or disable the debug timeout?

I can't see any options in the IDE or Xdebug php.ini config. The Xdebug documentation states:

When the URL variable XDEBUG_SESSION_START=name is appended to an URL, Xdebug emits a cookie with the name "XDEBUG_SESSION" and as value the value of the XDEBUG_SESSION_START URL parameter. The expiry of the cookie is one hour.cookie is one hour.

but doesn't suggest how to change the expiry time.

Answer 1

Find php.ini and add the following line to the xdebug section.

xdebug.remote_cookie_expire_time = 3600

The number is the time in seconds for the cookie to remain active, which defaults to 3600 (1 hour). I set it to 36000 (10 hours), which works fine and encourages me to restart the process occasionally to free memory. You can set it to 0 (unlimited) if you want, although I found that caused odd freezes here and there.

Remember to restart Apache for the change to kick in.

Answer 2

This is probably related to your Apache-Configuration.

The probable cause is a configured timeout that defines after what period of time the server ends the process if nothing happens ... makes sense usually, but when debugging you might be just busy taking a look at something.

My setup is somewhat different from yours but maybe I can help you.

In the apache-folder /sites-available are located the files that configure your domain-related virtual hosts. Within the -Tags of your Domain and protocol I put

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
     AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
     IdleTimeout 300
     IPCConnectTimeout 20
     IPCCommTimeout 120
     IdleScanInterval 120
</IfModule>

That increased in my case the available period of time until the timeout would be triggered from 40 to 120 seconds.

Then (of course) restart your apache.

Maybe that helps.