WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Session Persistence

Session persistence involves persisting the data stored in the HTTP session object. This typically is done to support failover across a cluster of servers. For instance, if the session state is duplicated between two running servers, and if one goes down, the other server can take over and no data is lost. WebLogic supports five different mechanisms for persisting session state information:

Memory (single-server, nonreplicated)

The session data is stored on a single server in memory.

File

The session data is stored on a shared filesystem.

JDBC

The session data is stored in a database table.

Cookie-based

The session data is stored at the client end in a cookie.

In-memory replication

The session data is stored in memory on multiple servers.

By default, WebLogic stores session state information in memory in a nonreplicated manner. The other four persistence mechanisms are desirable when the web application is deployed in a WebLogic cluster. Session persistence allows WebLogic Server to support automatic session failover. Session failover ensures that a server failure remains transparent to the user — another server will seamlessly pick up the backup of the session data. Because the session data is now persistent and accessible to multiple server instances, session information isn’t lost when the server goes down. Clearly, session persistence will be more expensive than just storing the session data in memory on a single server. The session caching mechanism can help ...