Sessions emptied

[Maxime Ducharme]

Hi group

We have a problem with sessions in one of our sites.
Sessions are used to store login info & some other infos
(no objects are stored in sessions).

We are using Windows 2000 Server (IIS 5.0) with
ASP 3.0 (no .NET on this site).

Sometime, data in session is emptied. I say "sometime"
since the problem does not happen frequently and not
always at the same time. We are unable to reproduce
the problem manually.

I looked in all ASP code and the only Session.Abandon
or Sessions.RemoveAll are in 1 page, the page used to
"log out" of our site.

I created a global.asa with code that logs SessionStart
and SessionEnd in a SQL database, so I can monitor
Sessions creation and deletion.

In this table i log :
- time
- session ID
- IP
- action ("Start" or "End")

When the problem occurs, I show session ID and content
on the screen. All content is empty, but the ID is ok.

i can see in the logs that the session is still alive
(there is no SessionEnd corresponding to the ID, i see
it when the session timeout expires)

I can also monitor number of sessions via performance
monitor (we have about 15 active users), so I can easily
correlate logs & number of active sessions.

I'd need help to monitor sessions further, someone have
a suggestion ?

Any other ideas on what could cause problem to sessions ?

Maxime Ducharme
Programmeur / Spécialiste en sécurité réseau

 

[Aaron [SQL Server MVP]]

Any other ideas on what could cause problem to sessions ?

http://www.aspfaq.com/2157

 

[Jeff Dillon]

We had a similar problem. In our case (Windows2003 Server), we had a 3rd
party dll that our application used (aspimage.dll) that crashed w3wp.exe,
which quickly restarted each time automatically (2-3 times a day at random
times), which emptied all current sessions. Check the Event Log for
suspicious entries.

Jeff