What is session persistence

Request a Demo. How Does Session Persistence Work? What is a Sticky Session? Compare Session Cookies vs Persistent Cookies The persistent cookie vs session cookie comparison actually returns to the difference between browser-length sessions and persistent sessions. How can Avi Networks Help? Featured Resources White Papers. Understand microservices architecture and how Avi integrates with container apps.

View Now. White Papers. See how Avi delivers enterprise-grade, software load balancing, and real-time analytics for OpenStack. If the Domain attribute in the Set-cookie header does not include the domain to which the original request was made, the client or browser might reject the cookie. As specified in RFC , the client accepts a cookie with the Domain attribute value example.

It does not accept a cookie with the Domain attribute abc. The URI path in which the cookie is valid. The Set-cookie header inserted by the load balancer contains a Path attribute with the specified value. Clients include the cookie in an HTTP request only if the path portion of the request-uri matches, or is a subdirectory of, the cookie's Path attribute.

The amount of time the cookie remains valid. The Set-cookie header inserted by the load balancer contains a Max-Age attribute with the specified value. The specified value must be at least one second. No default value for this attribute exists. If you do not specify a value, the load balancer does not include the Max-Age attribute in the Set-cookie header. Usually, the client or browser retains the cookie until the current session ends, as defined by the client. Whether the Set-cookie header should contain the Secure attribute.

The Secure attribute directs the client or browser to send the cookie only using a secure protocol. If you set this field to true, you cannot associate the corresponding backend set with an HTTP listener. Whether the Set-cookie header should contain the HttpOnly attribute. For example, it restricts the cookie from JavaScript channels. Whether to disable fallback for unavailable servers. Path route rules take precedence to determine the target backend server.

The load balancer verifies that session stickiness is enabled for the backend server and that the cookie configuration is valid for the target. The system ignores invalid cookies. When a session expires, all data stored in the session is discarded. You can set the interval in either web. WebLogic Server uses cookies for session management when cookies are supported by the client browser.

The cookies that WebLogic Server uses to track sessions are set as transient by default and do not outlive the session. When a user quits the browser, the cookies are lost and the session ends. This behavior is in the spirit of session usage and it is recommended that you use sessions in this way. You can configure session-tracking parameters of cookies in the WebLogic-specific deployment descriptor, weblogic. A complete list of session and cookie-related parameters is available in session-descriptor.

For longer-lived client-side user data, you program your application to create and set its own cookies on the browser via the HTTP servlet API.

The application should not attempt to use the cookies associated with the HTTP session. Your application might use cookies to auto-login a user from a particular machine, in which case you would set a new cookie to last for a long time.

Remember that the cookie can only be sent from that particular client machine. Your application should store data on the server if it must be accessed by the user from multiple locations. You cannot directly connect the age of a browser cookie with the length of a session.

If a cookie expires before its associated session, that session becomes orphaned. If a session expires before its associated cookie, the servlet is not be able to find a session. At that point, a new session is automatically assigned when the request. You can set the maximum life of a cookie with the cookie-max-age-secs element in the session descriptor of the weblogic. See cookie-max-age-secs. User authentication information is stored both in the user's session data and in the context of a server or virtual host that is targeted by a Web application.

The session. If the server or virtual host is hosting only one Web application, the session. There are several Java methods and strategies you can use when using authentication with multiple Web applications.

For more information see Logging Out and Ending a Session. By default, Web applications do not share the same session. If you would like Web applications to share the same session, you can configure the session descriptor at the application level in the weblogic-application. To enable Web applications to share the same session, set the sharing-enabled attribute in the session descriptor to true in the weblogic-application. The session descriptor configuration that you specify at the application level overrides any session descriptor configuration that you specify at the Web application level for all of the Web applications in the application.

If you set the sharing-enabled attribute to true at the Web application level, it will be ignored. All Web applications in an application are automatically started using the same session instance if you specify the session descriptor in the weblogic-application. You use session persistence to permanently store data from an HTTP session object to enable failover and load balancing across a cluster of WebLogic Servers.

When your applications stores data in an HTTP session object, the data must be serializable. There are five different implementations of session persistence:. File, JDBC, cookie-based, and memory single-server, non-populated session persistence have some common properties. Each persistence method has its own set of configurable parameters, as discussed in the following sections.

These parameters are subelements of the session-descriptor element in the weblogic. This section describes parameters common to file and JDBC-based persistence. You can configure the number of sessions that are held in memory by defining the following parameters in the session-descriptor element in the weblogic. These parameters are only applicable if you are using session persistence:. When you use memory-based storage, all session information is stored in memory and is lost when you stop and restart WebLogic Server.

To use memory-based, single-server, non-replicated persistent storage, set the persistent-store-type parameter in the session-descriptor element in the weblogic. See persistent-store-type. JDBC persistence stores session data in a database table using a schema provided for this purpose. You can use any database for which you have a JDBC driver. You configure database access by using connection pools.

Because WebLogic Server uses the system time to determine the session lifetime when using JDBC session persistence, you must be sure to synchronize the system clock on all of the machines on which servers are running in the same cluster.

Set up column names and data types as follows. This column is used as part of the primary key. Number of seconds between client requests before the session is invalidated.

A negative time value indicates that the session should never time out. For non read-only requests, the Web application container updates the database for the changes to session state after every HTTP request. This is done so that any server in the cluster can handle requests upon failovers and retrieve the latest session state from the database.

To prevent multiple database queries, WebLogic Server caches recently used sessions. Recently used sessions are not refreshed from the database for every request.

The number of sessions in cache is governed by the cache-size parameter in the session-descriptor element of the WebLogic Server-specific deployment descriptor, weblogic. See cache-size. Cookie-based session persistence is most useful when you do not need to store large amounts of data in the session. Cookie-based session persistence can make managing your WebLogic Server installation easier because clustering failover logic is not required.

Because the session is stored in the browser, not on the server, you can start and stop WebLogic Servers without losing sessions. There are some limitations to cookie-based session persistence:. In some situations, a browser or wireless device may not accept cookies, which makes session tracking with cookies impossible. URL rewriting is a solution to this situation that can be substituted automatically when WebLogic Server detects that the browser does not accept cookies. URL rewriting involves encoding the session ID into the hyper-links on the Web pages that your servlet sends back to the browser.

The default value for this attribute is true. Technically speaking, it means identify a client in between different HTTP requests. Session persistence is different from data persistence for which we use databases, files, and ORMs since the thing to maintain is not the state of the application, but of the interaction with a particular user. Session persistence is usually enough if it lasts for the time of a single usage from minutes to hours , thus a local storage on a web server can be employed usually RAM.

Parameters like the ip address of the client are not reliable for this recognition, and as we'll see, every web application has to craft a custom approach to session persistence since the HTTP protocol does not offer such a facility.

Even HTTP-based authentication is repeated at every interaction resending password , but it is not as widely used as a cookie-based approach. HTTP is a stateless protocol - but it gives us workarounds to maintain the identity of clients during a connection. Stateless means that each HTTP request, taken as-is, is independent of the previous and next ones.

There is no state of the connection embedded in the protocol like with TCP sequence numbers: in fact, typically a connection is opened when you request a page with your browser and closed when the operation is completed. The stateless nature of the protocol is what makes proxies work, since they can easily cache idempotent GET requests. Still, a new connection is created at every click.