Hi Mike,
I need a better understanding of when a session gets created as opposed to when an existing session is used.
Let me put forth my understanding and if someone can tell me where I'm right/wrong I'd greatly appreciate it.
OBSERVATIONS
I've observed the following behavior.
* On mozilla, if I bring up my application on multiple tags of the same browser instance, it all seems to access the same session (assuming I haven't abandoned it).
* With mozilla, on the same client, if I bring up multiple versions of mozilla, it seems to tap into different sessions.
* With konqueror (which I must support), from the same hardware client, even with different instances of the browser, it seems to tap into the same session.
* From different hardware clients, it always seems to create a new session or tap into an existing session from that same client).
This all boils down to how cookies behave. If you understand how cookies work, you will understand sessions, too (probably, at least).
SESSION MECHANICS THEORY
So, my theory based on these observations is that a cookie defines a session and that cookie always has the exact name "session-id" and, for some reason mozilla must maintain separate caches of cookies per browser invocation will mozilla does not.
So you do understand cookies :-)
QUESTIONS
* Is there any way to have more than one session for a given hardware client perhaps based on application?
I don't fully understand this question, but you might try to use cookie-less sessions using URL rewriting. This way you are not bound to how different browsers/browser instances handle cookies. But you must take care of session initialization (creating new sessions) at corresponding pages.
That would imply either the session-id cooke could be prefixed or somehow the browser would store it in a subdirectory based on the application (I don't know if browsers allow this type of control within the cookie directory though I'm scpetical the sub-directory thing is feasible).
* With regard to session timeout, if it is set to something like 60 minutes, is that 60 minutes from the beginning of session creation or 60 minutes from the point of last activity. The latter seems more useful and typical to me, but I'd like to confirm it...
Last activity.
* Our application is characterized by few simultaneous users that perform tasks where there is significant computation. While the computation generates a fair amount of data (a few MB), the computation takes long enough that it is highly desirable to keep the results in session. Is there a limit to how much data I can keep in session?
Depends on what kind of session storage you use. See:
http://www.apache-asp.org/config.html#StateDB
IMHO the default state manager can only handle 1k or so - others can hold much more data.
Based on how our applicaiton is characterized is there any reason to not keep the data in session?
Session data is stored on disc. Because of this, on every page where you use the session it must be fetched, which might slow down you application and increase the memory usage of your application.
Hope this helps.
- Csongor
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