I'm developing a site for someone in which I don't own the servers. Their session timeout right now is 10 minutes. They claim that the server balances the load, and that 10 minutes is enough inactivity before they auto logout the user by expiring their session.

So my question is "Can I have a section on my page where the user presses a button and opens up a window that they can minimize; and this window will just call a webpage every 5 minutes, and that webpage will call the previous one every 5 minutes" effectively keeping the session alive til the user chooses the LOGOUT option (which abandons the session)?

Does this sound legit, or are server's smart enough not to count the repeated request for one page and another as "Keeping the session alive"? Sessions exist per user, right? Not just the window in which they have open.

I think I have done this on before (not on purpose). I had a page that open a pop up window to show current news.
I had set a meta refresh for every 5 min. and it seemed as though the session never expired. But then again I'm not sure <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>

fliquid