I am working on a number of web projects for a firm. Most of the projects are ab

Question

I am working on a number of web projects for a firm. Most of the projects are about one or two pages of input and then doing a save to a MySQL database. My system administrators are pushing to try to get session replication working in JBoss, but I don't really see any need for it and all of its overhead. We need load balancing and clustering so if the server does go down we can move the new requests to the backup server, but I am not to big in session replication.

This is very low volume projects. In my eyes, what are the odds of a user being in the project as the server goes down on the one or two pages? I am trying to convince the system administrators that session replication is an unnecessary complication in this instance.

In my situation, should I be using session replication? If not, what are the best reasons to not use it so I can convince the system administrators?

Explanation / Answer

We typically use a pattern, where a session's content is split between what is only needed on this server (often, but not allways an empty subset)and what has to persist between servers. The latter part is then written to a temp store (mostly memcached) on session save, recalled on session load.

This allows not only passing round between servers, but also between different platforms: Think of a Webapp that is gradually moved from e.g. PHP to JBoss.

In my experience, the memcached overhead is far lower than the session replication overhead, especially as the number of servers grows.

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