Maintain a user's session state in an ASP.NET MVC app hosted on a web farm

Question

What is the best way to maintain a user's session state in an ASP.NET MVC app hosted on a web farm?

Out application currently uses the standard ASP.NET session on IIS 6.0 but we want to move the app to a web farm environment. I have read that we can use SQL Server session state for our application but I just want to know if anybody was using something else and why!

Answer 1

You could try storing your sessions in memcache. Should be both fast and scalable. It does require some memory though.

Answer 2

As discussed in one of the StackOverflow podcasts: usually session state is very minimal - a few keys here and there - and works well to simply store this in a central database.

Answer 3

One way would be to use the Velocity distributed cache.

Answer 4

Storing session in SQL is still valid in MVC (as it was in WebForms):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317604

We're using it successfully across a few boxes for our MVC app, and have used it across quite a few boxes for older WebForms apps.