When building an ASP.NET MVC application with a goal of high availability, is it a good practice to keep the session state on the SQL Server, if there is no state server available?
I need to work with an exisiting platform 2-3 web servers and a sql server.
Jay
2010-06-07 19:44:52
Perhaps you should update your question to include all of your requirements, then.
Craig Stuntz
2010-06-07 20:49:54
Incidentally, however, AppFabric Caching is designed to work with multiple web servers, and it's faster than both SQL caching and sticky sessions, so I'm not sure I see your objection.
Craig Stuntz
2010-06-08 13:00:32
A:
The point here realy is that you have 2-3 webservers like you mentioned in the comment to Craigs answer.
One way is to use SQL-server sessionstate which has its own problems http://idunno.org/articles/277.aspx.
If you have this one SQL-Server I would be carefull, because the DB for sessionstate will put heavy load on it. Each request will write to the db.
We use 2 webservers and a Loadbalancer that has sticky sessions. If your first request ends up in server 1 then all your requests are handled by server 1. (Its a bit more sophisticated but you get the idea.)
This might not allways be the best solution, but at least on our site (its a shop where user typically stay 20-30minutes) it works well. We use only little SessionState and have most of the userspecific stuff stored by the ProfileSystem. But I guess the ProfileSystem will also fail if requests go to different servers.
Malcolm Frexner
2010-06-07 20:45:13