I just had this same experience! I was doing too much. I got mine working by letting the templates do everything and learning more about the user namespace and my new favorite command (keys (ns-publics 'user))
http://llsouder.blogspot.com/2018/10/spacemacs-cider-figwheel_42.html
the easiest option would be to switch to using a cookie based session without expiry
in that scenario you wouldn't have a server-side memory session at all, and all the session information would be tracked by the cookie, there are examples in the official Ring docs here https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Sessions