Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Session Affinity and Session Persistence

Should you have session affinity enabled when scaling application servers horizontally?

Yes.

Should you have session persistence when scaling application servers horizontally?

Unless your business requirements place a very high emphasis on having transparent failover in the limited situations where session persistence can make a difference, Sun recommends against using session persistence. Session persistence has its own performance overhead and, unless transparent failovers are absolutely mandated by your business requirements, leave session persistence turned off.

If you study the failure scenarios documented in Understanding Failure Scenarios, in six of the eight scenarios there is no difference in the end-user experience or required recovery actions, regardless of whether session persistence is enabled. Only in scenarios one and four are there any difference between the session-persistence scenarios as opposed to the no-session-persistence scenarios.

In these two scenarios, session persistence can provide some failover transparency, but session persistence hurts performance. Based on the size of the session objects, the repository being used for session persistence, and the optimization of your specific application server's session management code, the performance overhead can range from 10 percent to 20 percent or even higher.

Should you have multiple application server instances in a cluster when scaling horizontally?

Multiple application server instances are not absolutely needed unless you want session persistence. Fail-over without session persistence can be achieved even if all application server nodes are not in a cluster.