How to keep session alive for longer

[Jane]

I’m self-hosting a streamlit app and have users complain that the session state is lost if they step away from the computer for some time. What is a good way for dealing with this?

I thought about saving the session_state to disk, but some of the entries are not serializable.

Then there is the st_autorefresh component. Is that the recommended way?

Or can I just change some configuration paramter, such that the session stays alive for longer?

[mathcatsand]

What platform/OS/service are you using to self-host? If I run a Streamlit app locally, I can leave it overnight without losing state. Although, some elements, like st.file_uploader can cause a little mayhem when trying to keep a session running.

Also, your users’ browser settings can come into play. If a websocket disconnects and doesn’t quickly reconnect, then the session will be lost. This is especially common on mobile devices or if a device goes to sleep. (If you scale horizontally by creating multiple Streamlit servers and don’t have custom routing, a websocket reconnect could reset even an active session if it doesn’t coincidentally reconnect to the exact same server.)

Besides st_autorefresh, you can also define a trivial fragment with run_every defined. st_autorefresh will rerun the app, but a fragment could rerun a basically empty function for efficiency. Depending on your and your users’ precise situation, those may or may not address your problem, though.