CakePHP's global configuration can be found in app/config/core.php. While we really dislike configuration files, it just had to be done. There are a few things you can change here, and the notes on each of these settings can be found within the comments of the core.php file.
DEBUG: Set this to different values to help you debug your application as you build it. Specifiying this setting to a non-zero value will force Cake to print out SQL statements and stop flash messages from forwarding.
CAKE_SESSION_COOKIE: Change this value to the name of the cookie you'd like use for user sessions in your Cake app.
CAKE_SECURITY: Change this value to indicate your preferred level of sessions checking. Cake will timeout sessions, generate new session ids, and delete old session files based on the settings you provide here. The possible values are:
high: sessions time out after 10 minutes of inactivity
medium: sessions time out after 20 minutes of inactivity
low: sessions time out after 30 minutes of inactivity
CAKE_SESSION_SAVE: Specify how you'd like session data saved. Possible values are:
cake: Session data is saved in tmp/ inside your Cake installation
php: Session data saved as defined in php.ini
database: Session data saved to default (not yet implemented, check back here soon)