What is Session Timeout? What is it used for?

What is Session Timeout? What is it used for?

Timed out sessions show when an idle session is discarded. Sessions are used to maintain a stateful HTTP connection. These sessions contain user profiles and other useful information.

What is Default Session Timeout? How do I manage it?

The <default-session-timeout> tag specifies the timeout value. The default value is 30 minutes. It can be modified as:

• Increase to 60 minutes: Web sites used for online shopping should have a high session-timeout value. If lower value is set, these sessions may be discarded prematurely causing inconvenience to users.
• Decrease to 5-6: For Web sites providing static information, the session time out may be set to a lower value such as 5 minutes. If set to a higher value, it results in increased memory usage, as the session objects take a long time to be cleaned up.

Viewing Sessions

To view the number of sessions from shell, use the status command. This displays the number of sessions created and sessions getting timed out. For example:

Sessions: 100
Session going to be timeout in next Timer iteration: 60

If the number of sessions timed-out are substantially lower than the session count in store, it means that many sessions are active and are consuming a lot of VM memory. In this case, it is better to set the session timeout to a lower value. If the application permits, reduce the session-timeout value. Where higher values are required, it is not possible to reduce it irrespective of performance status. The main aim is to keep the session count low.

How do I clean up Stale Sessions?

To improve Server performance, an idle session is discarded.

Session Cleanup Time

For optimal performance, set the value as half of <default-session-timeout> parameter.

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