Another ASP Session problem with IIS6, somebody must have a definative answer!

[Adam Short]

I'm having all sorts of problems with Sessions, I've been using them for
years with out a hitch, all of a sudden the last 6 - 12 months since getting
our new Win2003 server it's all gone shakey!!!

Our development server started life as an NT4 machine and has been simply
upgraded from one operating system to the next, it is now a cross, NT4
Server, Win2000 Server, Win2003 server. All development sites work fine and
under heavy stress. The machine only has 256 Mb RAM with PII processor,
great for stress testing scripts. Our new server is a fresh install P4
Win2003 server with IIS6, I'm getting all sorts of session problems, And
across multiple sites.

Anyone have any ideas, I've switched the server into IIS5 compatibility mode
so it's not that.

Bearing in mind our mismatched server works fine locally, with no
configuration changes since it was first installed with IIS4, or was it 3?
might even have been IIS2! can't remeber...

I think Session recycling is taking place but can't find any evidence of it

Regards Adam

 

[Adam Short]

Quite simply the server works fine from reboot, after about a week site
visitors start to complain about lost sessions, they log into the admin
pages fine look at a couple of pages then the system just drops the
sessions, I'm thinking either Session or Application recycling maybe? The
users then log in again only to be immediately kicked out etc...

I've ready 101 other instances of this problem, I have never had problems
like this from Session variables before and I've been using them for years.

It must be either an IIS or MS problem, probably a hot-fix!

what are these session problems?

 

[Adam Short]

It's got 256 Mb

Pool Size 1
Lifetime Limit 0
Memory Limit 0
Expiration Timeout 15
Call Limit 0
Activation Limit 0

 

[Jihad Bisha]

I'm having the same problem with session variables, i have a
web application that uses iis and it used to work find but when we moved
to windows 2003 with iis 6 the system used to hang, and i found out that
the problem was using session variables to pass values between asp's,
and iis 6 dose not support that, so we are trying to replace session
variables with cookies.

 

[Mark Schupp]

Session variables do work with IIS6 if there is only one process allowed in
the application pool that the application is assigned to (session vars
cannot pass process boundaries).

check the IIS configuration to make sure that session state is enabled and
make sure that there is only one worker process assigned the to application
pool.

If you need multiple worker processes (a "web garden") then you will have to
"roll your own" session management system using cookies, hidden form fields,
or a database. For general purpose session variables I would lean toward the
database approach using a single cookie to contain an identifier and keeping
the session data in a database table.