Asp.net Server Side State Management -Sessions

Web is stateless, which means a new instance of a web page class is re-created each time the page is posted to the server. As we all know, HTTP is a stateless protocol, it can't hold client information on a page. If the user inserts some information and move to the next page, that data will be lost and the user would not be able to retrieve that information.

We need to store information. Session provides a facility to store information on server memory. It can support any type of object to store along with our own custom objects. For every client, session data is stored separately, which means session data is stored on a per client basis.

State management using session is one of the best ASP.NET features, because it is secure, transparent from users, and we can store any kind of object in it. Along with these advantages, sometimes session can cause performance issues in high traffic sites because it is stored in server memory and clients read data from the server. Now let's have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of using session in our web applications.

Storing and retrieving Sessions

Types of Sessions

Advantages:

• It helps maintain user state and data all over the application.
• It is easy to implement and we can store any kind of object.
• Stores client data separately.
• Session is secure and transparent from the user.

Disadvantages:

•  Performance overhead in case of large volumes of data/user, because session data is stored in server memory.
•  Overhead involved in serializing and de-serializing session data, because in the case of State Server and SQL Server session modes, we need to serialize the objects before storing them.