Wang Kai

I found it very annoying that phpmyadmin after a quite short amount of time they needed to authenticate again.

If you use cookie authentication method in your phpmyadmin, you might probably find it very annoying as you will automatically be signed out after certain period of idle time. This is because the lifetime of the cookie itself is set to 1800 seconds (30 minutes) by default, after which you need to authenticate again to log in.

To remedy this, simply edit the configuration file config.inc.php and add the following line:

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 3600*3;  // 3 hours, or 10800 seconds

This sets the cookie timeout to 3 hours, which is usually long enough.