sessions and asp.net timeout issues due to host's pool application shutdown

[Mad Scientist Jr]

My asp.net pages sessions are timing out after 20 minutes, and when I
asked my Web host about it they said due to the nature of a shared
hosting environment they cannot allow for sessions to keep application
pools and worker processes hosed for too long as these fearures are
consuming CPU resources while they are active. Therefore the pool
application shutdown and re-start settings are at 20 minutes. Is there
a workaround for this? Do I just not use session variables in my pages?

 

[George Ter-Saakov]

I did not understand where do you have a problem.

The Session expires after 20 minutes of inactivity. Then the application
shutdown itself.
Why would you want to keep it up if no one using it?

George.

 

[Mad Scientist Jr]

That's not what's happening, the web host is shutting it down even if
people ARE using it. Basically every 20 minutes all web sessions are
getting killed. I either need to find some other way to keep the
session alive or re-code without using session.

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

re:

the pool application shutdown and re-start settings are at 20 minutes.

That is very short-sighted of your provider.

The IIS 6.0 default is 1740 minutes ( 29 hours ).

You should request that, even if they limit sessions to 20 minutes,
that they provide a more reasonable time period for application recycling.

6 to 12 hours should be enough...without taxing their servers too much.

If they cannot, or refuse to, do that, their servers are overloaded
( if they cannot handle 6-12 hours of app recycling time )
and they need to upgrade their platform capability by putting
more servers online or upgrading their current server's RAM capacities.

 

[George Ter-Saakov]

Well that is the problem with your host,

I am afraid you will not be able to change it on your end.
Change the host if they are refusing to fix their configuration.

The only workaround you could use is to keep Sessions in SQL see session
section in web.config

George.

 

[Jeff Dillon]

No, that is incorrect. They simply mean that they don't want to extend the
session timeout longer than 20 minutes. There is no way to shut down all
sessions, without recycling the server. No ISP would EVER indiscrimitately
do this to disconnect all users

jeff

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

re:

There is no way to shut down all sessions, without recycling the server.

That's the mistake they are making.

re:

No ISP would EVER indiscrimitately do this to disconnect all users

You'd be surprised. I've seen some quite bone-headed ISP admins.

;-)