The particular server that I am using doesn't send the load balancing cookie on all the responses, it refreshes it every few responses (I am not sure how it decides to refresh it or not), so for example:
Response 1: has 2 cookies JSESSIONID and LoadBalancer cookies Response 2: has 1 cookie only JSESSIONID
What happens is that after Response 2 is received by the Axis client, the LoadBalancer cookie is forgotten about, it's dropped and it's not sent on subsequent requests, hence the load balancing is messed up and the client request ends up on a different middle tier which cannot recover the session based on the JSESSIONID.
The HTTP clients need to store cookies, add to them and only expire them when the cookie expiration time is reached (if they are session cookies, not persistent cookies then they are expired when the client process exits -- in memory cookies).
Where are the cookies stored between requests? In the Service, Stub, Call or HTTPTransport?
Tim
Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:
Correction: case 2) below is not valid, apparently one cannot set multiple cookies in the same Set-Cookie header, there needs to be a header per cookie (but when the cookies are sent back to the server multiple cookies can be in one Cookie header, that's where my confusion came from).
Case 1) still looks like a bug though.
Tim
Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:
Hello Axis Developers & Users,
I think I've discovered an Axis 1.2RC2 bug.
Some servers use cookies to do load balancing, so in addition to the JSESSIONID session tracking cookie the load balancer may insert its own cookie in the HTTP response.
There are 2 cases here:
1) The HTTP response will have 2 headers:
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=......; path=/ Set-Cookie: LoadBalancer=....; path=/
It looks like the last cookie wins, the rest are discarded by the client and they are not passed back to the server when maintain session is true, so the session is lost between requests.
2) The 2 cookies may appear in the same Set-Cookie header. From briefly looking at the Axis processing code it looks like it trims anything past the first ';' it encounters so in this case the first cookie would be the only one maintained.
Please let me know if this is a bug and I will file it if you tell me where. If it's a known bug and possibly already fixed, please let me know.
Thanks.
