Asp.Net Session State

Problems with ASP Session State

ASP developers know session state as a great feature, but one that is somewhat limited. These limitations include:

• Process dependent. ASP session state exists in the process that hosts ASP; thus the actions that affect the process also affect session state. When the process is recycled or fails, session state is lost.
• Server farm limitations. As users move from server to server in a Web server farm, their session state does not follow them. ASP session state is machine specific. Each ASP server provides its own session state, and unless the user returns to the same server, the session state is inaccessible. While network IP level routing solutions can solve such problems, by ensuring that client IPs are routed to the originating server, some ISPs choose to use a proxy load-balancing solution for their clients. Most infamous of these is AOL. Solutions such as AOL's prevent network level routing of requests to servers because the IP addresses for the requestor cannot be guaranteed to be unique.
• Cookie dependent. Clients that don't accept HTTP cookies can't take advantage of session state. Some clients believe that cookies compromise security and/or privacy and thus disable them, which disables session state on the server.

ASP.NET Session State

ASP.NET session state solves all of the above problems associated with classic ASP session state:

• Process independent. ASP.NET session state is able to run in a separate process from the ASP.NET host process. If session state is in a separate process, the ASP.NET process can come and go while the session state process remains available. Of course, you can still use session state in process similar to classic ASP, too.
• Support for server farm configurations. By moving to an out-of-process model, ASP.NET also solves the server farm problem. The new out-of-process model allows all servers in the farm to share a session state process. You can implement this by changing the ASP.NET configuration to point to a common server.
• Cookie independent. Although solutions to the problem of cookieless state management do exist for classic ASP, they're not trivial to implement. ASP.NET, on the other hand, reduces the complexities of cookieless session state to a simple configuration setting.

Session configuration

Below is a sample config.web file used to configure the session state settings for an ASP.NET application:

<configuration>
  <sessionstate 
      mode="inproc"
      cookieless="false" 
      timeout="20" 
      sqlconnectionstring="data source=127.0.0.1;user id=<user id>;password=<password>"
      server="127.0.0.1" 
      port="42424" 
  />
</configuration>

The settings above are used to configure ASP.NET session state. Let's look at each in more detail and cover the various uses afterward.

• Mode. The mode setting supports three options: inproc, sqlserver, and stateserver. As stated earlier, ASP.NET supports two modes: in process and out of process. There are also two options for out-of-process state management: memory based (stateserver), and SQL Server based (sqlserver). We'll discuss implementing these options shortly.
• Cookieless. The cookieless option for ASP.NET is configured with this simple Boolean setting.
• Timeout. This option controls the length of time a session is considered valid. The session timeout is a sliding value; on each request the timeout period is set to the current time plus the timeout value
• Sqlconnectionstring. The sqlconnectionstring identifies the database connection string that names the database used for mode sqlserver.
• Server. In the out-of-process mode stateserver, it names the server that is running the required Windows NT service: ASPState.
• Port. The port setting, which accompanies the server setting, identifies the port number that corresponds to the server setting for mode stateserver.

There are four general configuration settings we can look at in more detail: in-process mode, out-of-process mode, SQL Server mode, and Cookieless.

In-process Mode

In-process mode simply means using ASP.NET session state in a similar manner to classic ASP session state. That is, session state is managed in process and if the process is re-cycled, state is lost. Given the new settings that ASP.NET provides, you might wonder why you would ever use this mode. The reasoning is quite simple: performance. The performance of session state, e.g. the time it takes to read from and write to the session state dictionary, will be much faster when the memory read to and from is in process, as cross-process calls add overhead when data is marshaled back and forth or possibly read from SQL Server.
In-process mode is the default setting for ASP.NET. When this setting is used, the only other session config.web settings used are cookieless and timeout.
If we call SessionState.aspx, set a session state value, and stop and start the ASP.NET process (iisreset), the value set before the process was cycled will be lost.

Out-of-process Mode

Included with the .NET SDK is a Windows® NT service: ASPState. This Windows service is what ASP.NET uses for out-of-process session state management. To use this state manager, you first need to start the service. To start the service, open a command prompt and type:

net start aspstate

We changed only from inproc mode to stateserver mode. This setting tells ASP.NET to look for the ASP state service on the server specified in the serverand port settings—in this case, the local server.

SQL Server Mode

The SQL Server mode option is similar to that of the Windows NT Service, except that the information persists to SQL Server rather than being stored in memory.
To use SQL Server as our session state store, we first must create the necessary tables and stored procedures that ASP.NET will look for on the identified SQL Server.Open cmd and then type 


c:\\windows\\microsoft.net\\framework\\v4.0.30319


and then 



For example, the following command creates a database named ASPState on a SQL Server instance named "SampleSqlServer" and specifies that session data is also stored in the ASPState database:

aspnet_regsql.exe -S SampleSqlServer -E -ssadd -sstype p

Performance and Reliability Considerations

It's worth mentioning, briefly, some of the performance and reliability issues you should consider when using ASP.NET session state modes.

• In process. In process will perform best because the session state memory is kept within the ASP.NET process. For Web applications hosted on a single server, applications in which the user is guaranteed to be re-directed to the correct server, or when session state data is not critical (in the sense that it can be re-constructed or re-populated), this is the mode to choose.
• Out of process. This mode is best used when performance is important but you can't guarantee which server a user will request an application from. With out-of-process mode, you get the performance of reading from memory and the reliability of a separate process that manages the state for all servers.
• SQL Server. This mode is best used when the reliability of the data is fundamental to the stability of the application, as the database can be clustered for failure scenarios. The performance isn't as fast as out of process, but the tradeoff is the higher level of reliability.