Howard Miller

I thought that FAQs had been widely discredited.

https://alistapart.com/article/no-more-faqs-create-purposeful-information-for-a-more-effective-user-experi/

Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by "scoring data from Moodle's output format". Are you talking about Moodle grades?

The broad answer is "yes". Moodle is open-source and highly "pluggable". So - assuming such a thing doesn't already exists for whatever your target system is - then you could write something. Or have it written.

The code you pointed me to is an abstract class. So the concrete session handler (for whatever session handler you use) overrides that class. All session_start() does is call other functions in that class. If you do nothing PHP implements file-based sessions but Moodle provides a bunch of alternatives. If you want to know more, the docs are here, https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.sessionhandler.php.

But... I'd still need to be convinced that this is a real session problem. As I say, if simply closing and reopening the browser "solves" the problem, then it most likely is nothing to do with sessions.

I know I'm being picky, but session_start() will call the handler_open() and handler_read() functions - so it's more likely to be going wrong in one of those.

Having said that, a long running task of any description can time out the page and then attempting to reload the page results in a session lock error. That's relatively common. Restarting the browser is the solution. However, that's just a symptom of an entirely unrelated problem. Moodle won't let you run multiple sessions in the same browser, so the result of trying is a session timeout.

I have no idea if I'm helping

....answering my own question (sort of). It was to load up some example data for unit testing. I noticed that all the core stuff just writes records directly to the table so I'm just doing the same.