load-balancing

What is the difference between session affinity and sticky session in context of load balancing servers? Lou Franco I've seen those terms used interchangeably, but there are different ways of implementing it: Send a cookie on the first response and then look for it on subsequent ones. The cookie says which real server to send to. Bad if you have to support cookie-less browsers Partition based on the requester's IP address. Bad if it isn't static or if many come in through the same proxy. If you authenticate users, partition based on user name (it has to be an HTTP supported authentication mode

PHP stores its session information on the file system of the host of the server establishing that session. In a multiple-host PHP environment, where load is unintelligently distributed amongst each host, PHP session variables are not available to each request (unless by chance the request is assigned to the same host -- assume we have no control over the load balancer). This site, dubbed "The Hitchhikers Guide to PHP Load Balancing" suggests overriding PHPs session handler and storing session information in the shared database. What, in your humble opinion, is the best way to maintain session

I am building a web application with Spring Security that will live on Amazon EC2 and use Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers. Unfortunately, ELB does not support sticky sessions, so I need to ensure my application works properly without sessions. So far, I have setup RememberMeServices to assign a token via a cookie, and this works fine, but I want the cookie to expire with the browser session (e.g. when the browser closes). I have to imagine I'm not the first one to want to use Spring Security without sessions... any suggestions? In Spring Security 3 with Java Config , you can use HttpSecurity