Prevent session expired in PHP Session for inactive user

I have a problem with my application: my application has many forms and need about 1 hour to finish this form because the form is dynamic (can add other forms). The problem is: the session of my web server is 24 minutes. When user fill the form, they spent so much time and the session timed out because server recognize that the user is inactive. It's very annoying when form submitted, most data was lost and the user is returned to the login page. I have tried to make my session expired in 10 hours with this code:

ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', '36000');

But it's not working in my server, is it possible my server preventing ini_set() function?

So, what should I do for solving this problem? Can I prevent session timeout so that the session can be expanded to 10 hours? Or can I disable session expiration?

Thanks

Instead of setting the time in ini to a fixed length, remind that session timeout is reset on reload. So create some ajax code that does a request every 5 minutes or so to a file (image or smth). This way the timer is reset every 5 minutes and users can spend a day filling out your forms.

Here an example to prevent session timeout by using a jQuery Ajax call:

var refreshTime = 600000; // every 10 minutes in milliseconds
window.setInterval( function() {
    $.ajax({
        cache: false,
        type: "GET",
        url: "refreshSession.php",
        success: function(data) {
        }
    });
}, refreshTime );

in the refreshSession.php you can do something like session_start()