Defective session state?

[DC]

Hi,

we are using ASP.Net 1.1 on eight servers with one session state server
(the windows 2003 service). Too often we are getting the exception

"Unable to make the session state request to the session state server.
Please ensure that the ASP.NET State service is started and that the
client and server ports are the same. If the server is on a remote
machine, please ensure that it accepts remote requests by checking the
value of
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aspnet_state\Parameters\AllowRemoteConnection."

on a client browser. If that same browser (IE 7 in my test) is used to
get the same webpage again it will take 30 seconds or so and the error
page with the message above will appear again, no matter which server
was used to respond. (Strange sidenote: the string "176e" leads the
sourcehtml of our error page - we did not put it there and it is almost
exactly the hexdecimally coded size of the error page in bytes. Also,
at the end of our error page a "0" is appended. These number only
appear with the session state exception.)

While one would think that this means that our state server is not
responsive or reachable, everything works fine if one opens another
browser instance (another IE7 tab is not enough). The first instance
will keep getting the exception, all other browsers will work fine at
the same time. It does not matter which server is serving the request.

Once we restart the state server, the bowser that did have the
exception before works fine again.

This looks to me like the session stored in the session cookie of the
browser is defective somehow. It got corrupted and the state server
will answer strangly to it. I am baffled. Maybe there is a way to avoid
this in the client code? But I think the 30 second wait time is the
response time of the state server to the corrupted session.

I am very thankful for any hint on this.

Regards
DC

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

Make sure all of your machiens are set up correctly. If it happens
intermitently, there are two possible causes i can think of:

1) The state server is inadequate for the number of requests
2) One server is set up incorrectly and not able to store or return session
information correctly

If you are using sticky sessions (probably based on your post), figure out
which server it is blowing up on and fix the web.config and/or
machine.config on that machine.

 

[DC]

Hi Gregory,

thanks for the hint. It may be true that the state server is inadequate
(so the next question is how to scale it). I don't think any .config
files are false since they are all the same on all machines and the
problem occurs only every other week.

It still looks to me like the session stored in a temp cookie got
corrupted somehow and the state server will take about 30 seconds to
answer the request while other sessions work just fine.

Regards
DC