How to increase shopping cart time?

I notice if a shopper is not logged in, or if a new customer has not yet signed up, that the items in their shopping cart will disappear after a short period of time, i.e. 1 hour?

I've been testing my cart and it irritates me, so I can imagine it would irritate a new customer as well. Simply leaving the cart for a quick lunch, you come back and every thing is gone.

How can I increase this time?

I believe it's 24 minutes. It isn't recommended that you change that interval, but 24 minutes is 1440 seconds.

Why is it not recommended to change it?

I wanted to increase it to around 2 hours. Would this interfere with something else?

I can imagine if you had a large store, someone could be on it for way more than 24 minutes looking around.

Where would I find this in the code? Or can it be changed from admin? I don't see it in admin. Thought it would be under Config:Sessions, but don't see anything that relates to the shopping cart.

The main reason for the 24 minute timeout is not to leave a session open if a user is at a computer in a public place and leaves without logging off or shutting down. A logged-in user would leave their account information accessible to anyone who came by. (A non-logged-in user would have no personal information entered, so would not be at risk.)

A user can browse the site forever, as long as they do not leave it for more than 24 minutes at a time, without losing their cart contents.

I need the solution to this as well. I have customers who need a lot more time than 24 minutes so I would like to know what file to change. We do not keep customer payment data on our server, so I'm not concerned about that, but it is also the customer's responsibility not to leave their information up on a public computer. So it be helpful is if someone could provide us the file that we can change.

I do, however, think that if they are logged in as a customer and not a guest it will save indefinitely. I know that I have myself as a customer of my store and I've added stuff to the shopping cart as a guest to get an idea of the pricing for quotes, then logged in and there are items from the last time I logged in and added them to the cart. I'm testing this theory now and will get back to you. I have a customer who was making a large purchase and lost everything in her cart, which is really, really frustrating. I don't know if she was logged in or not.

Use the Developers Tool Kit to search for 1440.

stevesh ... I found where you answered the question in this post http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=150018

patchouli ... it is in the includes/functions/sessions.php file on this line: $SESS_LIFE = 1440;

patchouli ... I added something to my shopping cart a few hours ago logged in as a member of my site. I logged out. Then I just logged in again and the item was still there. So, if they are logged in it will save it in their shopping cart. But if they are just a guest browsing it will not.

...unless you install this, which might be a better option than increasing the session duration:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=1433