Use of StateServer with C# Website?

Question

I've got two web portals that are almost identical in architecture. One requires that I add the following to my web.config and enabling the state server, as the logged-in user sessions expire after 2-5 seconds:

<sessionState mode="StateServer"
                      stateConnectionString="tcpip=localhost:42424"
                      cookieless="false"
                      timeout="20"/>

I'd like to know what some of the root-causes are that will cause this issue in one web portal but not the other.

This is a C# ASP.Net v3.5 app sitting on Windows 2008 R2.

Strangely enough, on my local dev box (Windows 7), I don't need to enable this, and the sessions last just fine.

Any discussion on this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You also need to make sure that you define a machine key, in your servers in the machine.config files, or in your web.config.

I've implemented this scenario successfully on my work servers in a web farm scenario, most recently last week, and it has definitely helped maintain my sessions.

As to why you need to do this ---

The client needs a way to track their session ID. In a farm scenario, depending on traffic, they can be bounced from Server #1 on one page request, to Server #2 on another page request, then back to Server #1 on yet another page request.

This link is pretty helpful.