One cheap-trick that I once used was to store an expiration time-stamp in the session data. My software then checked this stored value, and updated it manually as needed. You could use the same approach to determine whether the session-data should still be honored by the application, and thus not be concerned about whether Catalyst is extending it. (In fact, you would want Catalyst to be extending it, so that you continued to have access to the stored expire-time value.) Yeah, it's a cheap trick, but it should work just fine.