Advanced Session Management with Active Server Pages

1
Advanced Session Management with Active Server
Pages

• Charles Crystle
• Founder Chief Technology Officer
• Chili!Soft

2
What is a Session?

• HTTP is a "stateless" protocol
• Real-world applications need state
• Session Object is an Active Server Page
  "intrinsic object"
• Stores data or objects
• Automatically times out and cleans up
• Can be manipulated programmatically

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How long do they last?

• Session.Abandon
• Session.Timeout
• Cookie expiration (browser exit)

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How Do Sessions Work?

• Internal DB with a Session key
• Session information held in an in-memory database
• Cookie is set to hold the key
• Each browser request contains the "key"

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How Sessions Work
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Where can this break down?

• No cookies
• Web farms
• Fault recovery
• Persistent sessions

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Scaling Your Web Application

• Vertical Scaling (bigger machines)
• more memory
• faster CPUs
• more CPUs
• other OS choices
• Should not need any code changes

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Scaling Your Web Application

• Horizontal Scaling (more machines)
• Hardware Routing
• Sessions as usual
• Return to same machine (user IP address)
• Arrowpoint and F5 use cookie techniques
• Session-less coding
• Advanced Session Techniques

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Session Save/Restore

• Pack or unpack the Session data
• Watch out for objects
• Code Examples

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Session Data in the Database

• Web Farms
• Fault Recovery
• Persistent Sessions
• Code Examples

11
Session Data as Form Data

• Web Farms
• No Cookies
• Code Examples

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Advanced Session Management with Active Server
Pages

• Charles Crystle
• Founder Chief Technology Officer
• Chili!Soft