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Asked: 2026-05-10T15:19:26+00:00

Here is my current question: I’m guessing that my problem (described below) is being

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Here is my current question:

I’m guessing that my problem (described below) is being caused by ASP.NET worker processes being recycled, per the answers below—I’m using InProc sessions storage and don’t see much chance of moving away, due to the restriction for other types of storage that all session objects be serializable. However, I can’t figure out what would make the worker process be recycled as often as I’m seeing it—there wasn’t any changing of the files in the app directory as far as I know, and the options in IIS seem to imply that the process would only be recycled every 1,740 minutes—which is much less frequent than the actual session loss. So, my question is now, what different cases can cause an ASP.NET worker process to be recycled?

Here is my original question:

I have a difficult-to-reproduce problem that occurs in my ASP.NET web application. The application has one main .aspx page that is loaded and initializes a number of session variables. This page uses the ASP.NET Ajax Sys.Net.WebRequest class to repeatedly access another .aspx page, which uses the session variables to make database queries and update the main page (the main page is never re-requested).

Occasionally, after a period of time using the page, causing successful HTTP requests where the session created in the main page properly carries over to the subpage, one of the requests seems to cause a new ASP.NET session to be created—all the session variables are lost (causing an exception to be thrown in my code), and a new session id is reported in the dynamically requested page. That means that suddenly, the main page is disconnected from the server—as far as the server is concerned, the user is no longer logged in.

I’m nearly positive it’s not a session timeout—the timeout time is set to something ridiculous, the amount of time it takes to get this to happen is variable but is never long enough to cause the session to time out, and the constant Sys.Net.WebRequests should refresh the session timer.

So, what else could be happening that would cause the HTTP requests to lose contact with the ASP.NET session? I unfortunately haven’t been sniffing network traffic when this has happened to me, or I would’ve checked if the ASP.NET session cookie has stuck around or not.

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1 Answer

  1. One solution would be to use a StateServer, rather than InProc session management.

    Lots of things can cause the session state to be lost:

    1. Editing Web.Config
    2. IIS resetting
    3. etc.

    If the session state is important to your app then use either SQL state management, or the State Server which ships with ASP. NET.

    Cheers,

    RB.

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