asp.net redirect if maximum connections/sessions reached

Question

hi

is there a way to redirect a user when there are n people/sessions on a site. I have a requirement to redirect to a 'sorry we are busy, please try later' page if there are too many people currently engaging the site (this is to stop flooding a live business service that is behind the webpages). The ideal is that only new users (users not already logged in) are shown this page. I was going to just count concurrent logins but wondered if there was a better way to count current activity rather than login status being that most users might stay logged in for a while.

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are several ways you could do this.

I think the most obvious way would be to do this in IIS. If you are using IIS 6.0, you can do this by going into the website properties, go to the performance tab and change the connection limit to what you require. You can then customise the default IIS error message (I think this is classified as code 500).

Alternatively, you could do something when the user attempts to login to the website. You would need to have a mechanism to keeping track how many users are connected, one way of doing this might be to use the Membership provider, which allows you to track (count) how many users are currently logged in (presumably through some basic math on the timestamp values in the membership tables).

Finally, you could probably at a push do something with Ajax to keep telling the server that the a user is "still online", but I would do this as a last resort.

My money would be on the first option.

Hope this helps