Manging Session and cookies with apache

Hi.
I am a newby in python, and your help is highly appreciated.
I am building a web application on apache web server , that requires:
1. Form authentication
2. Setting session expiration time individual per user.

My question:
1. Is there a python module that I can use to handle session state?
( since it needs to support concurrent access, and fast access,
How can it be built in memory? or db(a bit too slow I reckon? )
2. Is there any built in mechanism that I can use to expire sessions
on the server?
3. How can I set the cookies attributes ( expiration time, etc.. )

Thank you very much
Roy