session_save_path setting failed
===

I am unable to set my custom php session saving path from inside an php script.

    ini_set('session.save_path', "/var/www/domain.com/sessions");
    echo ini_get('session.save_path')."<br />";

    session_save_path("/var/www/domain.com/sessions");
    echo session_save_path()."<br />";

The above code prints

    /var/www/domain.com/tmp

    /var/www/domain.com/tmp

which means the default settings persist.

I am very limited to any workarounds:
1) no access to php.ini
2) htaccess causing error 500 - php_value directives are disabled

So I really need to overwrite the session storage from inside of php scripts.

Any ideas how to solve the problem?

(The directory /var/www/domain.com/sessions exists under owner/group = root/root, having the write permissions properly set for others. Exactly the same way as the default tmp dir.)
