How It Works

The IIS Session Object

The IIS Session object stores variables in memory and tracks user sessions using a cookie. This works very well on one server, but breaks down in a web-farm situation (with sticky-ip off) where you never know which server will service a particular request. The reason for this is that the session object is stored in the webserver’s local memory and the other servers have no knowledge of it.

SessionFarm & the IIS Session Object

SessionFarm works by saving and loading the contents of the IIS session to a file-share or back-end SQL server.

  1. At the beginning of a session the SessionFarm object writes a cookie to the client just like the IIS Session object does.
  2. At the top of each ASP page the SessionFarm object reads this cookie and retrieves the information for that session from a file-share or the SQL server. This IIS Session object is then populated with this information.
  3. Your ASP code accesses the IIS Session object just like normal.
  4. At the end of each ASP page the SessionFarm object writes the IIS Session contents back to the file-share or SQL server.

SessionFarm & ASP.NET

SessionFarm allows you to read, update and create Session variables that can be read by legacy ASP pages built-in Session Object. SessionFarm does this by loading the saved IIS session from the SQL server using a C# .NET class.