[ic] Session Dropping in High and Low Traffic

[Kevin Walsh]

> 
> Using Ethereal, I decoded these HTTP headers when the session problem first 
> occurred in this instance.
> 
> You can see in the GET request that it passes the ID but then the server 
> responds with an MV_SESSION_ID equaling a different value.
> 
> You can also see below that the Cookie prints out 2 different session IDs.
> 
> Please let me know if there is any other information that I can provide...
> 
> GET /cgi-bin/teststore.cgi/2114.html?id=gysXRrsl HTTP/1.1
> Accept: image/gif, image/x-bitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, 
> application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, 
> application/msword, */*
> Accept-Language: en-us
> Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
> User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)
> Connection: Keep-Alive
> Cookie: MV_SESSION_ID=XmRDAwEd:64.242.33.55; MV_SESSION_ID=gysXRrsl:64.242.33.55
> 
That is the GET data sent from the browser to the server, not the
response header.

Your browser is sending two different cookie values with the same
cookie name.  I assume that the "XmRDAwEd" session ID has expired,
is owned by someone else or is simply non-existent.

If Interchange receives a session ID that doesn't belong to you
then it will assign you a new session.  That appears to be what
you are seeing.  The question is why?

Do you have a persistent session ID cookie lurking on your disk?
I remember seeing someone messing with persistent session ID cookies
a while ago.

Does your browser always send the same bogus session ID along with
the valid one, perhaps in a random order each time?  Does Interchange
only create a new session when the bogus cookie is first in the list?

Does this problem occur when using a different browser, or when using
MSIE 5.5 on a different PC?

I have no idea why this problem would stop when switching to PreFork
(RPC) mode; the same session code is used either way.  Which Interchange
version are you using?  I don't think you said.

Can you try cleaning out all of your persistent cookies.  I imagine
that MSIE has a way to do this.  If not then I'm reasonably sure that
NT5 has a "format" command. :-)

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