Thread: Confused about timed out sessions

...or maybe the problem is something else but here's what happens:

After having moved around the store for a while as a logged in user I am logged out. That is totally fine if the session has timed out but it seems strange that I am able to move around to view product descriptions and then, only seconds after having viewed the last product description and clicking on the Home link to go to the startpage discover that I have been logged out. What is happening? I thought the session only timed out if I had been inactive for a certain time?

Also, I don't like that the automatic logout is totally silent. The only information the user gets about having been logged out some menu changes ("Logout" becomes "Log in" and the cart is emptied). Can I somehow direct the user to some "You have been logged out" page instead?


Petter

AspDotNetStorefront recommends a minimum application pool allowance of 125MB for reliable operation of AspDotNetStorefront. Larger site (those containing many products and entities, or site that receive large numbers of visitors over short time periods) may require considerably more memory. Users should contact their hosting provider or IT staff to determine if the environment can be made suitable to host the website. Kindly have a look also at this article link below.

If you are on a dedicated server we recommend at least 2GB of memory (4GB is better, as Microsoft SQL Express will eat about 1.5 GB by itself and memory is usually very cheap) and a modern multi-core processor. Dedicated servers that meet these requirements are very common and inexpensive, and will provide much better performance. If .NET does not have enough memory to operate efficiently, important things start getting swapped out of the cache, application pools reset, etc. SQL will also perform extremely poorly because it does a lot of swapping to disk. From what I know SQL does not run properly even with a tiny database on machines with less than 1GB of memory.

Hi Louie, we are also having a problem with what appears to be the session timing out. We only see it in the admin panel - though that is usually where we are. We are hosting with Appliedi and only began having this issue last week. I have had them check the memory periodically over the last few days while I saw issues, but it was never near the limit (of 175 mb). We don't get much traffic (about 250 users / day) but ew do have quite a few product (about 4000). Do you have any ideas?

This could also be an inactivity timeout. Most providers will shut down the application pool after X minutes without a request to preserve resources on the server. There are several ways around it, but the easiest is probably just to set up a service to hit the site every few minutes to keep it spooled up.

his is actually happening while I am logged on the site and actively doing something - like updating a product, running a report, etc. We've also had customers complain that they could not complete their purchase because it was logging them out - just began to hear this today.

I don't remember the details, I know I posted a summary of what I found but I cant find that post. However, I had a similar problem and in the web.config I had the machine key setting to automatic, or whatever it is that is similar to that. That was causing me to get logged out. Once I changed it to a static one using the machine key generator I've not been logged out since.

Hopefully this makes some sense to you. Like I said, I just cant find my original post.

That would make sense as well, particularly is you are using shared load balancing or something like that. Generally we see viewstate MAC validation errors when something like that occurs, but it is certainly worth a try.

Thanks ssgumby. We do have it set to automatic. I'll give it a try.

Thanks so much 4 sharing with us,bros :-)

Any other ideas for the admin timeout? We've been using a static machine key for months and my client complains that they regularly are timed out while using the admin site. No problems reported regarding customers on the site, just admin users. My client's site is hosted by appliedi.

Does anything else need adjusting or just the machinekey? The site we are working on that experiences the issue of logging the customer out is also hosted with AppliedI. I'm not knocking AI at all, just noticed the common thread here.