SQL Server requests time out as TempGetStateItemExclusive is getting called continuously

Question

I run a site with decent traffic (~100,000 page views per day) and sporadically the site has been brought to its knees due to SQL Server timeout errors.

When I run SQL Profiler, I see a command getting called hundreds of times a second like this:

...
exec dbo.TempGetStateItemExclusive3 @id=N'ilooyuja4bnzodienj3idpni4ed2081b',...
...

We use SQL Server to store ASP.NET session state. The above is the stored procedure called to grab the session state for a given session. It seems to be looping, asking for the same 2 or 3 sessions over and over.

I found a promising looking hot fix that seems to address this exact situation, but it doesn't seem to have solved the problem for us. (I'm assuming this hotfix is included in the most recent .NET service pack, because it doesn't look like you can install it directly anymore). I added that registry key manually, but we still see the looping stored procedure calls like above (requesting the same session much more often than every 500ms)

I haven't been able to recreate this on a development machine. When two requests are made for the same session ID, it seems to block correctly, and even try to hit SQL until the first page releases the session.

Any ideas? Thank you in advance!!!

Answer 1

It's been some time, but its there not a cleanup job that runs to remove stale sessions? Is it enabled.

This old KB mentions it. Like I said, it's been a while.

Answer 2

Just out of curiosity. Have you opened up that proc to see what it does?

If it's just making a select statement, you might look to see if it is using NOLOCK or not. If not, add NOLOCK to it and see what happens.

Answer 3

This may be one of those cases where I needed an answer to a different question. The question should have been "Why am I using SQL to store session state information?" SQL is much slower, and much more disconnected from the web server, both of which may have contributed to this problem. I looked up the size of our ASPStateTempSessions table and realized it was only about 1MB. We moved back to <sessionState mode="InProc" ... /> and the problem is fixed (And the site runs faster)

The next step, when traffic dictates, would be to add another servers and use the "StateServer" mode so we can spread out the memory usage.

I think I originally made this move to deal with a memory bottle neck which is no longer an issue. (This is not a good solution to dealing with a memory bottle neck, FYI!)

IMPORTANT EDIT: Ok, so it turns out that the whole "TempGetStateItemExclusive" thing was not the problem, it was just a symptom of another problem. We had some queries that were causing blocking issues, so every SQL request would just get kicked out. The actual fix was to identify and fix the blocking issues. (I still believe that "InProc" is the way to go, though) This link helped a lot to identify our issues:

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/how-to-identify-blocking-problems-with-sql-profiler/