Unable to serialize the session state?

Question

We have reasonably large scale application and recently experiencing issues with random logouts. Upon investigation we've found app pool is recycling after physical memory limit of (1GB)is reached. I m now trying to save session state in out of process as below

<sessionState mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424" cookieless="false" timeout="20"/>

After changing the session state mode to "StateServer" and running the asp.net state service on server. I m getting the following error message

"Unable to serialize the session state. In 'StateServer' and 'SQLServer' mode, ASP.NET will serialize the session state objects, and as a result non-serializable objects or MarshalByRef objects are not permitted. The same restriction applies if similar serialization is done by the custom session state store in 'Custom' mode."

Apparently i have to mark session related objects with [Serializable] attribute but the application is quite big. Is there a way around this issue?

thanks

I have to observe: in today's terms, 1GB is pretty measly for a web-server - increasing the memory could be a very cost-effective way of improving performance here without the overhead (bandwidth, latency, IO - or code changes) required by serializing state; we usually use 32GB for the web-tier, but even 4GB would make a big difference here... — Marc Gravell♦
btw, regardless of what you do, I would strongly advise that it is always a good idea to have dedicated objects just for session-state - ideally very simple, pure data "DTO" types (no implementation details, no 3rd-partly tools, no events, etc) - and definitely immutable. Once you have that, the decision to add [Serializable] (or not) is a trivial one: plus you will know exactly what you are storing in session-state, and why — Marc Gravell♦
we have a total physical memory of 8GB on the win 2003 server. I have increased Maximum used memory in megabytes to 2000 but have not set anything for Maximum virtual memory. Is it advisable to use virtual memory as well? if so what could be a reasonable value for it — rumi

Darin Dimitrov Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-19T11:11:05

Is there a way around this issue?

No, you have to analyze all the objects that are participating in the object graph that you are storing into the session and decorate them with the [Serializable] attribute.

The alternative's not gonna like you: write a custom session state provider where you will have control over the serialization of your session state objects but that's usually an overkill.

Unable to serialize the session state?

1 Answers