Hi everyone, There are several of us at Urbana-Champaign that are interested in getting a better picture of how our current management of sessions for our OPAC affects our users. We're in a pretty early state in the project and thought it might be useful to gather some rough numbers about other institutions as well for comparison. The major issue we're wondering about is how long do you let your sessions go for? We timeout sessions after 5 minutes of inactivity, any more and the system may become unstable.
We also have recently done a rough metric by counting how many times our timeout warning page was accessed to find out how many users were timed out of our system. On a slow day the timeout page is accessed around 300 times, on a busy day over a 1000 times. This page is only accessed if the user attempts a search on a page but their current session has timed out. Some of these are likely to be due to people trying to use another person's session at a public terminal. In other words, this data includes the situation where someone does a search, leaves, and another person comes up and tries to click "new search" but the session has already timed out. So some useful information might be: size of your school/institution or average users a day, how long is your timeout, and how many timeouts do you have? (Note - I'm cross-posting on Web4Lib, Code4Lib, LITA-L using my work email, [EMAIL PROTECTED], and LITA-L using my gmail account [EMAIL PROTECTED] Feel free to send to either.) Jonathan T. Gorman Research Information Specialist University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana 216 Main Library - MC522 1408 West Gregory Drive Urbana, IL 61801 Phone: (217) 244-4688
