Hi,

Is anyone else using Mod Auth CAS with clustered servers and shared sessions? I 
would be grateful for advice on how to share session state between servers.

I have colleagues using Mod Auth CAS on four clusters of eight Linux servers. 
Each cluster is load-balanced (without sticky sessions) and uses AFS for shared 
storage. Until recently CAS session files were stored on an AFS partition (the 
CASCookiePath). However, we've recently had some mysterious problems with 
Apache processes and as part of the investigation Mod Auth CAS session files 
were moved off the shared AFS storage and are no longer clustered.

As you would expect, this is causing a *lot* more traffic to the CAS server and 
isn't a good solution. Simply moving back to AFS may bring scalability issues - 
I don't think AFS is a good fit due to frequent writes, lack of locking in AFS, 
sync overhead, and so on. We've seen similar situations with PHP session files. 
Sticky sessions aren't possible on this service as we're getting thousands of 
connections per second.

My preference is to patch Mod Auth CAS to use Memcached, Redis or something 
similar to share state but this might take awhile to arrange.

Has anyone already worked around this problem?

Pete Birkinshaw

-- 
Peter Birkinshaw
Senior Directory and Registration Administrator
IT Services Division         | +44 (0)161 306 3118
The University of Manchester | PGP: 0xB7B0B433



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