msession problems

ether_us

OK - I've been at this all day. I can't seem to find anything useful on this on google or php.net...

I setup two msession servers one on a Redhat 9 box, one on Fedora Core 2. I have a webserver running Redhat 9. The msession server works perfectly locally and remotely using the provided tools.

Msession took some work to compile into PHP, I ended up having to insert -lstdc++ on the final link to get it to go.

I made my test script with:

<?php
session_start();

echo session_id();
print_r($SESSION);
$SESSION["testing"] = "test";
?>

And it worked, from the command line. Then I re-compiled PHP as a module for apache. This script appeared to work, it spit out a session id and everything. However, whatever msession server it is using is now LOCKED UP.:

[root@db1 bin]# /usr/local/phoenix/bin/madmin localhost STATUS
Failure: Can not open connection to host "localhost" on port 8086

But, the msessiond process was still running. The second I stopped apache, the server came back. So I thought maybe PHP just wasnt closing a connection or something so I gave this a shot:

$link = msession_connect ("prv-db1", 8086);
if ($link)
{
msession_disconnect ();
}

It did the same thing, worked from the CLI version, but froze up the msessiond when executed via apache.

So i've tried everything, apache1, apache2, php4, php5, different msession hosts (different OS's)......
I'm out of ideas.

Please help!

Delphi_KA

i'm suffering at the same problem!! (using apache + php 5.0.2)
i there anybody out there who can help???

ether_us

My solution has been to just use sticky sessions on my load balancer. While Msessiond would be nice, the more I've given it thought - it's just not well supported and doesn't seem like a great solution for providing high availability especially with the strange problems we've both experienced. I think there is a great need for something like msessiond since it can help fix the sessions and multiple web server problem, but an application like that needs to have redundancy kept in mind because anyone who is running 5+ webservers probably doesn't like to have a single point of failure. I am dissapointed to see msessiond basically abandoned..

What I've done is use a couple Content Service Switches to load balance my web servers, it has the ability to stick users to a specific load balancer throughout the user's session based on IP, Source/Destination ports and a cookie. It doesn't work as well as I would like (i.e. you're on AOL, you have cookies disabled, you're out of luck since AOL uses 'super proxies'.) The whole problem with all of this is it breaks the load balancing scheme, it is possible one server will get more active sessions on it than others, so your load balancing isnt very good. Plus, if one server goes down unless you're storing sessions on a NFS (which defeats the purpose of this setup) all the people on that one server will now lose their session.

I've considered the sessions in database approach but it just doesn't seem like it would be very fast. Anybody ever try this on a large scale as opposed to NFS or msessiond?