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Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:23:01 -0500 (CDT)
From: Milt Epstein <mepstein@uiuc.edu>
To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: Session problem -- sessions being recreated, browser related?
In-Reply-To: <00d501c0bc89$2fe43400$6400a8c0@p2266>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10104031711100.8219-100000@staff1.cso.uiuc.edu>
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On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Jeff Kilbride wrote:

> Hi Milt,
> 
> Are you using ajp12 or ajp13 as your connector protocol? Apparently,
> ajp13 has known bugs that cause dropped sessions.
> 
> I got this from Mike Slinn after visiting his site
> (http://tomcat.mslinn.com) and noticing that he said "Tomcat v3.2.1
> works better with this [AJP12] connector than with AJP13" in his
> server.xml explanation. I sent him an email to ask him why and he
> replied "ajp13 has bugs that cause dropped sessions."
> 
> If this is true, I'm surprised it's not more widely known. The docs
> talk about ajp13 being much faster due to it's connection re-use, so
> obviously it was my first choice. I'm not using sessions anywhere,
> yet, but if I do I'm going to implement ajp12 instead of ajp13. I'd
> be really interested to find out if this is the cause of your
> problems.

Thanks for the response.  I'm using mod_jserv, which means ajp12
(ajp13 is only available with mod_jk).  So I guess that can't be the
cause of my problems.

I don't think it's anything so complicated as dropped sessions.  I
think it just has something to do with the cookie handling that is
getting screwed up.  Like apache/tomcat not getting the session cookie
back, so it thinks there's no session.  (And recall that this is
something that was apparently working fine a few weeks ago when we
were using NES/ServletExec, so that restricts how general a problem
this is somewhat.)


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Milt Epstein" <mepstein@uiuc.edu>
> To: <tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 1:06 PM
> Subject: Session problem -- sessions being recreated, browser related?
> 
> 
> >
> > On a servlet-based application I have, I'm getting sporadic reports of
> > problems from users.  The symptoms are similar to what happens when
> > cookies are disabled (but they aren't, because I had the users check).
> > Basically, they can't get past the front page of the application,
> > because it won't let them without a valid session (recall that session
> > access is handled via cookies -- I'm not using URL Rewriting).  And
> > each time they try, Tomcat is creating a new session for them (and
> > giving them a new cookie).  Apparently, it's not recognizing the
> > existing session.
> >
> > Now, this is only happening to a small subset of the users.  I haven't
> > isolated a pattern yet, but it may only be happening from certain
> > machines.  And the couple of machines I have found the problem on so
> > far are both using Internet Explorer version 4.0.  So that might be a
> > factor.  (I don't have 4.0 myself, but I did find an old copy of 3.02,
> > and it works OK with that.)
> >
> > Oh, a bit of background -- we switched over from using Netscape
> > Enterprise Server and ServletExec to Apache/Tomcat a couple of weeks
> > ago, and the problem seems to have only started occurring since then.
> > So it does appear to be something Apache/Tomcat-specific.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Milt Epstein
> > Research Programmer
> > Software/Systems Development Group
> > Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
> > University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
> > mepstein@uiuc.edu
> >
> 

Milt Epstein
Research Programmer
Software/Systems Development Group
Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
mepstein@uiuc.edu