ASP.NET State Service Crash

November 30, 2004 @ 12:03 pm

I'm a big fan of the ASP.NET State Service for managing sessions. InProc Sessions in ASP.NET are just too volatile due to the fact that any touches of web.config or IIS initiated process recycles can cause the application to restart taking down any active InProc Sessions with it. The ASP.NET State Server addresses these shortcomings with a Session service that is accessed externally to the ASP.NET/IIS Application Pool worker process, so it can survive ASP.NET application restarts. It works over TCP/IP so it's also possible to use a single State Server with multiple machines running in a WebFarm.

However, I've been noticing that the State Service is somewhat flakey in a number of situations. Specifically it appears that the service takes a bit of time to fire up where ASP.NET is up and running taking requests, but the state service is still initializing. I've seen more than a few ASP.NET applications fail on the first few hits that occur against the application with a session error. This error will go away after a few seconds after the State Service apparently has stabilized. The State Service Session doesn't handle this terribly gracefully. This problem seems to be isolated when traffic is fairly heavy on startup of the server.

Today I had another problem that was way more serious: The state server failed outright and shut down my Web applications on the server. My error logs pointed at Session problems, so I figured the service crashed. But it was running fine. I recycled the service but it still kept on failing. The service appears to be running, but it doesn't seem to be accepting connections even after a Stop and Restart of the service. Page request sit and hang for a while before failing with a Session error.

My temporay quick fix to isolate the problem was to switch the apps into InProc Sessions which made them run again immediately. I Eventually I ended up rebooting the machine and now the State Service works properly again.

Anybody else seeing this sort of behavior? I've seen this behavior both in my online apps as well as in the dev environment but it's very inconsistent and not reproducible. One of my apps has been having occasional odd hanging problems that I hadn't been able to trace down and now I'm wondering whether this is the same sort of problem occurring...

What would cause the State Service to get corrupted and stop taking incoming connections. Even after restarting it?

Feedback for this Weblog Entry

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Gabe November 30, 2004 @ 1:35 pm

My guess...gamma radiation.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Raymond Lewallen December 01, 2004 @ 1:54 am

The only time I had this problem was when the password for the account the service was running under was changed. Not much help to you though. I was just bored and wanted to type something.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Raymond Lewallen December 01, 2004 @ 1:55 am

Of course, had other problems with the service so now I use Sql Server to handle the session state and haven't encountered any problems going on 16 months now.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Jeff Lewis December 01, 2004 @ 2:37 am

I've run into similar problems, so I now use Sql Server.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by beth December 06, 2004 @ 7:04 am

I'm seeing that "odd hanging problem" too, but it seems to have no rhyme or reason... occurs only when accessing page on a web farm, only happens when an item is selected from datagrid/datalist/etc., will take 30+ seconds to load for no reason. did you ever find a reason??

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Rick Strahl December 11, 2004 @ 4:38 pm

According to the documentation of SP1 for .NET 1.1 there's been some fixes to the State Service that fix an issue with lockups and the service not accepting new connections. I installed it just a few days ago (finally) and we'll see if this does away with the mysterious crashes.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by RP February 02, 2005 @ 7:47 am

I've seen this problem, but have not been able to resolve, mainly becuase we cannot seem to reproduce it readily.

I suspect it is a problem on the ASP.NET (sending) side, not on the State Server side. I think TCP ports are being left in a TIME_WAIT state on the web server, so the next time a session request is made, another port is left open. Eventually local ports are exhausted and additional connections to the state server cannot be made.

You can view this behavior using the netstat command.

Also, I don't see any mention of the State Server in .NET 1.1 SP1. Do you have a KB article link about that? If there was a fix, that may be why we cannot reproduce the error.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by AL February 15, 2005 @ 9:42 pm

How did the update go? Any more oddness with the state service?

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Carri February 18, 2005 @ 6:43 am

We have been battling a problem like this for a few months now on a live production server. We had the same app running on the server with Windows 2000 and when the machine was switched to 2003 Server, the problem began happening very frequently, once every hour at least. Basically it was like you described, we began to get error messages of "Unable to make the session state request to the session state server....". Sometimes recycling the application pool would help, sometimes an IIS reset was needed.

We turned on web gardening with 10 pools and the error rate decreased dramatically, although it still happens about once a day now. Our server is typically under quite heavy load when the error occurs. With web gardening on, recycling the app pool does not seem to work and an IIS reset is always required to get it out of this state and back online.

This has been extremely frustrating for us and our customer. If anyone has any suggestions on this, we'd love to hear them!

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by sushil March 11, 2005 @ 2:12 am

sir, i have mention the session time out 1 min.
in web.config file & the session doesn't out.
please help me..?
rgds
sushil

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Lovely May 24, 2005 @ 8:00 am

When i am going to start Asp.net State service
it gives error no 1069 "Couldn't start Because of logon fail "

And I also an not able to open and run my web project because of error web server not found ,But web server is there on local system and world wide web Publishing service is started .
Please help.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Rick Strahl May 24, 2005 @ 10:47 am

Most likely somebody messed around with the system accounts or changed the accounts that are used to log on to those services. You can use the Service Manager app to make sure the right account is used and if necessary reassign logons.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by HEV June 16, 2005 @ 7:03 am

Got the same problem.

Look at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896600

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Al June 24, 2005 @ 3:09 am

Eek, Im just looking into the best ways to handle session in a web farm and am about to go this route. What happened? Have you found a fix or have you gone SQL Server route? I didnt really want to go SQL server route but most people seem to have chosen this now.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by James July 11, 2005 @ 7:31 am

We had the same problem. We have a cluster of 3 web servers all hosting the same application and all hitting the same SQL Server. After much research it turns out that we just had so much activity on our site that the disk speed of the SQL Server could not keep up. Our solution was to use a small RAM Disk and place the ASPState database onto that. No problems since.

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Ondrej Valenta August 03, 2005 @ 4:40 am

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308097

check this

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Cindy April 06, 2006 @ 8:39 am

Virus Scanning software on the server was causing our Sessions to be dropped. We had the server team exclude our web.config and Global.asax files from the scan.

No more problems!

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Abish October 02, 2006 @ 4:49 am

How to Manage Appilication Pool Crash..?

re: ASP.NET State Service Crash
by Adriano Friday @ 11:19 pm

Hi Rick.
Do you still use the ASP.NET Service State?
And about ASP.NET 2.0 some problem found? Are you using it in this version?

Regards.