High Availability ASP.NET MVC

Question

When building an ASP.NET MVC application with a goal of high availability, is it a good practice to keep the session state on the SQL Server, if there is no state server available?

Answer 1

The point here realy is that you have 2-3 webservers like you mentioned in the comment to Craigs answer.

One way is to use SQL-server sessionstate which has its own problems http://idunno.org/articles/277.aspx.

If you have this one SQL-Server I would be carefull, because the DB for sessionstate will put heavy load on it. Each request will write to the db.

We use 2 webservers and a Loadbalancer that has sticky sessions. If your first request ends up in server 1 then all your requests are handled by server 1. (Its a bit more sophisticated but you get the idea.)

This might not allways be the best solution, but at least on our site (its a shop where user typically stay 20-30minutes) it works well. We use only little SessionState and have most of the userspecific stuff stored by the ProfileSystem. But I guess the ProfileSystem will also fail if requests go to different servers.

Answer 2

I'd suggest AppFabric Caching (f.k.a. Velocity) instead.