Configuring the Web Application’s Session Settings

If you have relatively short-lived sessions, try decreasing the session timeout by configuring the value of the timeOutSeconds property under the session-properties element in sun-web.xml from the default value of 10 minutes.

If you have relatively long-lived sessions, you can try decreasing the frequency at which the session reaper runs by increasing the value of the reapIntervalSeconds property from the default value of once every minute.

For more information about these settings, and about session managers, see the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP12 Programmer’s Guide to Web Applications.

In multi-process mode when the persistence-type in sun-web.xml is configured to be either s1ws60 or mmap, the session manager uses cross-process locks to ensure session data integrity. These can be configured to improve performance as described below.

Tuning maxLocks (UNIX/Linux)

The implication of the number specified in the maxLocks property can be gauged by dividing the value of maxSessions with maxLocks. For example, if maxSessions = 1000 and you set maxLocks = 10, then approximately 100 sessions (1000/10) will contend for the same lock. Increasing maxLocks will reduce the number of sessions that contend for the same lock and may improve performance and reduce latency. However, increasing the number of locks also increases the number of open file descriptors, and reduces the number of available descriptors that would otherwise be assigned to incoming connection requests.

For more information about these settings, see the "Session Managers" chapter in the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP12 Programmer’s Guide to Web Applications.

Tuning MMapSessionManager (UNIX/Linux)

The following example describes the effect on process size when configuring the persistence-type="mmap" using the manager-properties properties (documented for the MMapSessionManager in the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 Programmer’s Guide to Web Applications):

maxSessions = 1000
maxValuesPerSession = 10
maxValueSize = 4096

This example would create a memory mapped file of size 1000 X 10 X 4096 bytes, or ~40 MB. As this is a memory mapped file, the process size will increase by 40 MB upon startup. The larger the values you set for these parameters, the greater will be the increase in process size.