random unexpected ASP.NET session expirations

[IUnknown]

We are experiencing an intermittent problem with our software.
Sometimes users' sessions expire prematurely and users lose
information (for instance entered on the form they just submitted).
Even though session timeout is set to 20 minutes, sometimes user will
get session expired after 2 minutes in the site.

Session state has following configuration:

<sessionState
mode="InProc"
stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424"
sqlConnectionString="data source=127.0.0.1;user
id=sa;password="
cookieless="false"
timeout="20"
/>

So, suspission is that either the cookie with the sessionID gets
affected somehow, or that the ASP.NET worker process gets restarted.

I was trying to locate ASP.NET session cookie, but did not find it in
the normal place where IE stores other cookies. That confused me. So
were does IE stores ASP.NET session cookies?

Anybody else experienced similar problems with ASP.NET sessions.

I don't know if that makes any difference for cookies, but from the IE
perspective the webserver's domain name is 'localhost'.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
IUnknown Interface

 

[Tommy]

How to u locate the ASP.NET session cookie? I believe that the ASP.NET
session cookie is a non-persistence cookie, so you won't find it being
saved in your hard disk, and that's by design.

Tommy,

 

[Prhando]

We had similar problems with our applications, going okay for four hours at a time, then suddenly timing out every ten minutes hand having to be restarted.

We eventually found that there is a limitation/feature of Internet Explorer that discards *ALL* cookies for the one domain (ergo, our application) if the number exceeds 20 ... that includes the cookie that maintains the session for the browser.

We've since moved to using alternate methods of storing values that we need to store that avoid cookie usage altogether.

And yes, the session is kept in a non persistent cookie so you won't see it. We had to devise a small cookie display window in asp.net to display all the cookies the application had going.