how to set session never expire in ASP

Question

Hello everyone,

I am using ASP classic (1.1) with IIS 6.0. Is there any options to set session never expire?

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

Session.Timeout=5

Would mean that it times out in 5 minutes. I don't think you can set this to infinity but you can set it to an approximately large number.

Answer 2

You can specify a Session.Timeout value in minutes. Or have your pages poll the server every n minutes (a javascript function would do that, or you can have a dummy iframe with refresh-content set to call a dummy asp page every n minutes).

This is better (albeit polling can be taxing on your server, don't poll too often) because if you set your session timeout to a very high (or infinite...) value you'll end up with asp crashing with an out of memory error (I guess the application pool will be restarted).

The session is kept alive when the user calls any asp page on your application before the timeout expires. If your user closes its browser, there's no way your app will be notified and asp will have to wait for the timeout to clean the memory. That means that the session will stay in memory for n minutes after the user is gone, n being the timeout.

There's no need to have an infinite session (it can be addressed by polling) and tweaking with the timeout parameter will make your application more fragile.

If you want to store information for a long while (basically, for the whole life of your application) you'd better use the Application object, which is a dictionary just like Session but is a singleton and can be accessed by anyone on the server.