I have my site (ASP.Net 4.0 C#) hosted on Azure server with multiple instances. My session state mode is "InProc". Somehow its not working on Azure instances, it doesn't maintain the state properly. Please advice.
Regards Vivek
3 Answers
8
votes
If you have multiple instances and are using InProc session, then Session data will not work - as it won't be shared across the instances.
Azure load balances your HTTP requests and may send each client HTTP request to a different server instance.
If you want to use Session state, then you need to use a shared session state provider, such as:
- the SQL Session State provider (although I believe this has some limitations on SQL Azure as it cannot use the SQLAgent code to periodically clear the state)
- the demonstration Azure Table Session State provider (not officially supported and sometimes reported as buggy)
- the latest AppFabric Session state provider (currently recommended by MS) - see http://appfabricdemos.codeplex.com/releases/view/65427
3
votes
Adding to Stuart's answer: The AppFabric Cache is caching-as-a-service, agnostic of any virtual machine instances. This service went live a few weeks ago. The AppFabric team provides a session state provider that uses the cache, requiring only a simple web.config copy-n-paste.
Because of the reasons Stuart mentioned, I wouldn't depend on SQL Azure or Table Storage for your session cache.
There's a good hands-on lab in the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit called Building Windows Azure Applications with the Caching Service - I'd go through that, as one of the topics is configuring session state using the AppFabric Cache.
I provided a bit more info in this SO answer.
1
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