I recently migrated an app from SQL Server backed sessions to the ASP.NET State Server. About once a week there is a brief failure of ASP.NET to connect to the state server. These last from 20 seconds to 2 minutes.
Unable to make the session state request to the session state server. Please ensure that the ASP.NET State service is started and that the client and server ports are the same. If the server is on a remote machine, ....
I've been running a data collector to identify possible causes and have isolated data for the outage windows, attached.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3650353/session-performance.xlsx
The one main concern is that during the outages, the % CPU for the asp_state.exe process jumps significantly higher. I had theorized mcaffee was a culprit, but there are other times when mcshield.exe spikes and there is no corresponding session outage.
I bumped the timeout from 10 to 15 seconds this week as well, but just had an outage today.
Does this data point to a culprit? What could the State Server be doing during these CPU spikes? Any other counters I should be tracking?
