After authentication in my project it takes about 10-20 minutes for the auth session to expire, which is not handy — you go to get a snack and see a login screen coming back.
This is how to make the TTL of your auth session longer:
$s = new Zend_Session_Namespace(
$this->_auth->getStorage()->getNamespace() );
$s->setExpirationSeconds( strtotime('30 day', 0) );
Now your users will log in for 30 days.
You can call this code in your login action after successful authentication and before the redirect to the landing page.