session_start seems to be very slow (but only sometimes)

Question

For some odd reason, just today our server decided to be very slow during the starting of sessions. For every session_start, the server either times out after 30 seconds, or

Answer 1

Have you tried session_write_close(); ? This will disable write-ability in session variables but you can still read data from them. And later when you need to write a session variable, reopen it.

I have also suffered from this problem but this thing worked like a charm. This is what i do:

session_start(); //starts the session
$_SESSION['user']="Me";
session_write_close();   // close write capability
echo $_SESSION['user']; // you can still access it