General Information on HTTP Session Management

This section provides information on sticky load balancers, session expiration, additional GemFire property changes, serialization and more.

Sticky Load Balancers

Typically, session replication will be used in conjunction with a load balancer enabled for sticky sessions. This involves, among other things, establishing a JVM route (JVMRoute=value). Refer to SpringSource ERS as a possible load balancing solution.

Session Expiration

To set the session expiration value, you must change the session-timeout value specified in your application server's WEB-INF/web.xml file. This value will override the GemFire inactive interval specified by maxInactiveInterval within context.xml.

Making Additional GemFire Property Changes

If you want to change additional GemFire property values, refer to instructions on manually changing property values as specified in the GemFire module documentation for Tomcat (Changing the Default GemFire Configuration in the Tomcat Module) and Application Servers (Changing the Default GemFire Configuration in the AppServers Module).

Module Version Information

To acquire GemFire module version information, look in the web server's log file for the following message:

Nov 8, 2010 12:12:12 PM 
com.gemstone.gemfire.modules.session.catalina.AbstractCacheLifecycleListener 
lifecycleEvent
INFO: Initializing GemFire Modules Version 1.1

Object Serialization

Objects managed by the HTTP Session Management Module must be serializable since the session's objects are serialized before being stored in the region.