Hi Tom,
A classic case would be concert ticket sales where you are allowed to browse the site with a fairly long session timeout (20 mins is the norm) but as soon as you start the process of buying some tickets, the session timeout drops to 5 minutes to give the thousands of users looking to book tickets a fair chance.
In my case I want a standard session of 10 minutes apart from our launchpoint which needs at least an hour to allow for long periods of inactivity - particularly in the winter.
When I had it set to a standard 10 minutes, We had occasions where the duty launch administrator has gone to click the "end flight" button only to find the message "your session has timed out - please log in again". The consequence of that was having to log back in again and then manually edit the aircraft downtime
It's a matter of managing server resources. It would be great if everyone remembered to log out - but they don't, instead they just close the browser
It's an easy one liner in ASP - something like session.timeout=10
