Question

I’m load testing an asp.net app.
The load test is simulating 500 user doing searchs on the site and browsing the results. I’m observing that the more I reduce the session timeout limit (in web.config) the better the page response time.
For exemple, with a timeout at 10 minutes, I got an average response time of 8.35 seconds.
With a timout at 3 minutes, the average response time for the same page is 3,98 seconds.
The session in stored “InProc”.
I supposed the memory used by the “no more used but still actives” sessions may be in cause. But, even if there is more memory used when the timeout is at 10, there is still plenty of memory available (about 2.7Gb).
Any ideas?

Answer 1

For my case, storing the session state out-of-process (StateServer) greatly improved performance, even if the state server is on the same physical machine than the web server.