Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 3: Advanced Application Development

Chapter 59. Managing Session State in Clusters

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• What Is Session State? 93

• The History of Managing State 94

• Options for Managing Session State 95

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What Is Session State?

The Web is a stateless environment. Every HTTP request or response to your Web server opens a connection, but after the action has completed, the connection is closed. These requests and responses contain no information to tell the server to associate a request with previous or subsequent requests. Session state is the process of associating a series of HTTP requests and responses with a unique user, and keeping a set of variables for that session.

Note

A user session, not to be confused with a session variable, is defined as a related ...