Does recycling the ASP.NET application kick users out?

Question

We have a problem where the solution seems to be to recycle the app pool for a particular site (a CMS issue we have little control of, I won't go into it here).

My question is that while this seems to work, if there are users on the site making payments etc, if we recycle will this kick them off?

Thanks Duncan

Answer 1

In the basic setup, yes.

Assuming your storing whether a user is logged in via session state, the basic ASP.NET setup is to store session state in memory. Recycling the application clears the memory allocated for that application, including the session state.

However, if your session state is configured to not be stored in memory, for example in a database, then no, users should not be kicked off.

Answer 2

If you're using InProc session state, their sessions will be abandoned, so yes they may be kicked/logged out. If this is becoming a problem, consider using StateServer or SQLSessionState session modes.