I have set session time out to 9 hours in web.config file something like this:
“<sessionState mode="InProc" timeout="540" />
But often users complain that they are facing time out in less than 9 hours of inactivity and the time interval after they are timed out also varies.
I was wondering if session time out is dependent on any of the below settings in IIS:
Session time setting
Idle- time out setting for Application pool
Recycling setting.
Please advise.
Also, how do I check session time out setting in IIS 7.0?
The session will be lost when the ApplicationPool recycles. That's one of the IIS settings that you mentioned. To set only the timeout in the web.config will not be enough. You need to adjust the setting in IIS.
Here is a link I found while I was looking into the same problem.
Also, this question was very useful: Losing Session State
If you are using Forms authentication you should make sure your FormAuthentication Cookie is set to expire at the same time as your Session.
If not make sure your IIS is not getting recycled. ( put a logger in your Global.asax to verify the application end events compared to your users complaints.)
It is not enough to set session time out in your web config. If the server on which your site is hosted is having less time out value set in IIS setting, your session is time out according to the server session time out value.
also if you are deleting any folder from the server directory, this can also cause your AppPool to recycle unexpectedly.
so please check the server session time out value and if it less then ask your hosting to increase it as per your requirement.
Related
Hey I have the following line in my web.config
<sessionState mode="InProc" timeout="45"/>
Which I thought would keep sessions intact for 45 mins
But I have seen the case where if a user is inactive for lets say 15 mins the sessions times out.
How can I stop this ?
Edit : Just noticed I have the following line in the master page
meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1800;URL=http://www.virtualacademy.ie/login.aspx">
Maybe this is causing the issue, what is the above line doing i.e the number 1800
Be sure to check your IIS configuration because the application pool that your site is hosted on also has its own timeout value which will override your own .config.
To increase it,
Open IIS
Select Application Pools on the left side
Select the Application Pool used by your site
Choose advanced settings
Under Process Model categtory increase the 'Idle Time-out' value to the desired length.
Hope this helps.
(If you do not have a dedicated server / access to IIS with your hosting provider you will have to contact them to see if they can increase it for you)
If the user closes their browser or clears cookies, or if the AppDomain on the server is recycled, the session state will be lost.
Have you checked logs to see if the app is recycling?
AppDomain recycles are a very common problem for this if the sessionState is InProc. It is very much advised to use a StateServer or SQLServer for production systems instead. See Session-State Modes for documentation on how to use each, and the pros and cons of the three different types.
Personally, we use SQL Server if we must for web server farms--slower but can be shared. We use State Server if the site will only be hosted on a single web server--state survives AppDomain restarts, but not entire server restarts.
Also, in the past we have used an AJAX post in the background while the user is watching long running videos or performing long client-side tasks, so that the session timeout gets reset every few minutes. Nothing special about this code--just have a little JavaScript hit every few minutes some ASPX page that returns nothing.
Are you using Forms Authentication? It has its own timeout setting that when expires will redirect the user to your login page even if their session is still valid.
I have an ASP.net application where Users aren't able to successfully complete certain actions, for reasons, I'm assuming, can only be related to losing their session (which is where I maintain their current user information, and how determine whether they are logged in)
I'm at a loss as to why they would lose their session, so my first question is:
What (in general) would cause a user to lose their session in ASP.net?
and since I don't know when a user loses their session and can't reproduce it myself:
How can I track when I user loses their session
Below is my sessionState config for reference
<sessionState
mode="InProc"
cookieless="false"
cookieName="My.Site.Com"
timeout="480"/>
A number of things can cause session state to mysteriously disappear.
Your sessionState timeout has expired
You update your web.config or other file type that causes your AppDomain to recycle
Your AppPool in IIS recycles
You update your site with a lot of files, and ASP.NET proactively destroys your AppDomain to recompile and preserve memory.
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If you are using IIS 7 or 7.5, here are a few things to look for:
By default, IIS sets AppPools to turn themselves off after a period of inactivity.
By default, IIS sets AppPools to recycle every 1740 minutes (obviously depending on your root configuration, but that's the default)
In IIS, check out the "Advanced Settings" of your AppPool. In there is a property called "Idle Time-out". Set that to zero or to a higher number than the default (20).
In IIS, check the "Recycling" settings of your AppPool. Here you can enable or disable your AppPool from recycling. The 2nd page of the wizard is a way to log to the Event Log each type of AppPool shut down.
If you are using IIS 6, the same settings apply (for the most part but with different ways of getting to them), however getting them to log the recycles is more of a pain. Here is a link to a way to get IIS 6 to log AppPool recycle events:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100803114054/http://surrealization.com/sample-code/getnotifiedwhenapppoolrecycles/
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If you are updating files on your web app, you should expect all session to be lost. That's just the nature of the beast. However, you might not expect it to happen multiple times. If you update 15 or more files (aspx, dll, etc), there is a likelyhood that you will have multiple restarts over a period of time as these pages are recompiled by users accessing the site. See these two links:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319947
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.compilationsection.numrecompilesbeforeapprestart.aspx
Setting the numCompilesBeforeAppRestart to a higher number (or manually bouncing your AppPool) will eliminate this issue.
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You can always handle Application_SessionStart and Application_SessionEnd to be notified when a session is created or ended. The HttpSessionState class also has an IsNewSession property you can check on any page request to determine if a new session is created for the active user.
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Finally, if it's possible in your circumstance, I have used the SQL Server session mode with good success. It's not recommended if you are storing a large amount of data in it (every request loads and saves the full amount of data from SQL Server) and it can be a pain if you are putting custom objects in it (as they have to be serializable), but it has helped me in a shared hosting scenario where I couldn't configure my AppPool to not recycle couple hours. In my case, I stored limited information and it had no adverse performance effect. Add to this the fact that an existing user will reuse their SessionID by default and my users never noticed the fact that their in-memory Session was dropped by an AppPool recycle because all their state was stored in SQL Server.
I was having a situation in ASP.NET 4.0 where my session would be reset on every page request (and my SESSION_START code would run on each page request). This didn't happen to every user for every session, but it usually happened, and when it did, it would happen on each page request.
My web.config sessionState tag had the same setting as the one mentioned above.
cookieless="false"
When I changed it to the following...
cookieless="UseCookies"
... the problem seemed to go away. Apparently true|false were old choices from ASP.NET 1. Starting in ASP.Net 2.0, the enumerated choices started being available. I guess these options were deprecated. The "false" value has never presented a problem in the past - I've only noticed in on ASP.NET 4.0. I don't know if something has changed in 4.0 that no longer supports it correctly.
Also, I just found this out not long ago. Since the problem was intermittent before, I suppose I could still encounter it, but so far it's working with this new setting.
In my case setting AppPool->AdvancedSettings->Maximum Worker Proccesses to 1 helped.
Your session is lost becoz....
JUST MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO RUNTIME ERRORS, ANY FATAL EXCEPTION WOULD
KILL THE SESSION!
In Microsoft stack, Visual Studio - put Ctrl + Alt + E - All Exceptions ON, then run the code in Debugging mode. Any Fatal ones are THE reason for session loss..
You could add some logging to the Global.asax in Session_Start and Application_Start to track what's going on with the user's Session and the Application as a whole.
Also, watch out of you're running in Web Farm mode (multiple IIS threads defined in the application pool) or load balancing because the user can end up hitting a different server that does not have the same memory. If this is the case, you can switch the Session mode to SQL Server.
I was only losing the session which was not a string or integer but a datarow.
Putting the data in a serializable object and saving that into the session worked for me.
Had a problem on IIS 8 when retrieving Content via Ajax. The issue was that MaximumWorkerProcesses was set to 2 and Javascript opened 17 concurrent requests. That was more than the AppPool could handle and a new pool (without auth-data) was opened.
Solution was to Change MaximumWorkerProcesses to 0 in IIS -> Server -> Application Pools -> [myPool] -> Advanced Settings -> Process Model -> MaximumWorkerProcesses.
Dont know is it related to your problem or not BUT Windows 2008 Server R2 or SP2 has changed its IIS settings, which leads to issue in session persistence. By default, it manages separate session variable for HTTP and HTTPS. When variables are set in HTTPS, these will be available only on HTTPS pages whenever switched.
To solve the issue, there is IIS setting. In IIS Manager, open up the ASP properties, expand Session Properties, and change
New ID On Secure Connection to False.
I had same problem by losing sessions. every time , every page reload, my sessions clear and by new reload any page, my sessions returned by valid value...
i fixed it by change MaximumWorkerProcesses from 0 to 1 in iis
I was struggling with this issue for 14 days.
Here's what helped me:
Check your recycling options in App Pool > Advanced settings. Turn off all of the options so it won't recycle on its own.
Check your web.config file for the executionTimeout property under httpRuntime and increase its value.
Check your web.config file for the timeout property under sessionState and increase its value (I set it to 300 minutes).
Go to the server's event log and check the Application log for unhandled exceptions that may cause the worker process to crash. Fix them in your code or use try and catch to eliminate this crash.
Try changing the value of your maximum worker process from 0 to 1 or the other way around, this may also solve this issue.
In my case, session state was loosing due to Load Balancer. Session was storing in one server and Load balancer was redirecting next call to another server where session state was missing.
In the web.config file for my application, in the <sessionState>
section I have set timeout="60" (in minutes), but session state
variables in my application seem to be expiring in about 1 minutes.
Any idea what could cause this?
Yes.
Session timeouts are also specified and controlled by IIS (although there is overlap ofcourse). In IIS 6.0 you also need to check the following places in IIS manager (properties of Virtual directory):
ASP.net tab > Edit configuration > Authentication tab > Cookie timeout
ASP.net tab > Edit configuration > State management tab > Session timeout
Setting all these to the same value, fixed the issue for me.
edit: Apparently the previously listed first option, had nothing to do with it. That means, that the first of the two options is now the place for you to fix your session timeout. It's probably not your session timing out, but the authentication expiring.
Or another possibility is that the worker process is restarted, or the application is restarted. Also things to look into.
If you are storing session state "in proc" then every time the app pool recycles you can loose session (this can happen a lot on a server with low memory). You could try storing session state "out of proc" using State Server or SQL Server.
See PRB: Session Data Is Lost When You Use ASP.NET InProc Session State Mode
We are having an intermittent problem with some users losing session. Our session settings in the web.config are as follows:
<sessionState mode="InProc" timeout="1440"/>
...which should be 24 hours (a value deliberately set over the top during testing).
Are there any other settings (maybe in IIS7) that I need to be aware of? Or are there any resources that will list the things that could kill a user's session?
Let me know if you need more information.
Thanks!
Dave
Changing the web.config file, or any of the dlls will cause the session to be destroyed, as will the recycling of app pools (this is usually set to a timeout of 20 mins of inactivity, but will also occur under certain exception conditions and possibly memory conditions)
Check Application Pool settings. There are several things there that can interfere with this:
Process recycling settings;
Several processes (then each would be keeping its own session stash);
Changing web.config or other web related files recycles the process immediately.
Anything that recycles the application pool will kill InProc session state.
Check the properties on the application pool by default there are several settings which may cause the pool to recycle in less then 24 hours.
Typically when testing there is little activity on the site and you fall foul of the pool idle timeout.
Thanks for all the replies, it seems it was because the App Pool was set to recycle at 3am and some of the users were just leaving themselves logged in over night and then just carrying on in the morning! We've added better session timeout handling now.
Thanks again!
I'm very confused when it comes to what actually decides the session time-out.
The web app needs to allow for a 20 minute "idle time" before logging (or throwing) users out. I've tried different setting on both sessionState and Recycle worker processes in IIS. The time-out remains too short and, as far as my quit-n-dirty, primitive tests have shown, a bit random.
I read somewhere that the default time-out is 20 minutes, but in my app it appears to be closer to five. Are there any easy ways to change this? The app is running .NET 3.5 on IIS 6.
EDIT:
I just realized that the Entity Framework might have something to do with the problem, as the user content is held as a context in the entity framework. Is there any time limit for how long an entity is held?
The user will be logged out based on your Authentication settings in the web.config.
The Session timout will be set in your session tag in the web.config.
If they are different then you will see "interesting" results.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972429.aspx
If you look in the web.config you can write some thing like this
<configuration>
<sessionstate timeout="20" />
</configuration>
and there you can set you timeout..
Use the sessionstate timeout. You do not want to use Recycle Worker, as this will recycle all sessions associated with that worker, every N minutes. It's a good idea to set Recycle Worker to a very high value if you are using the session variable.