How to efficiently manage session state in ASP.NET Core for scalability during a hackathon?
I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. During a hackathon project, my team is building a real-time chat application using ASP.NET Core. We want to ensure that our application scales effectively, especially under high user load. However, we’re unsure about the best way to manage session state given the potential increase in concurrent users. Initially, we opted for the default InMemory session state provider, which worked well in our development environment. However, we quickly realized that this approach wouldn’t be viable in production with several instances running behind a load balancer. To address this, we’re considering using a distributed cache like Redis. Here’s how we configured Redis in our `Startup.cs`: ```csharp public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) { services.AddStackExchangeRedisCache(options => { options.Configuration = "localhost:6379"; }); services.AddSession(options => { options.IdleTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30); options.Cookie.HttpOnly = true; options.Cookie.IsEssential = true; // Needed for GDPR compliance }); } ``` In our `Configure` method, we’ve added: ```csharp public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env) { app.UseRouting(); app.UseSession(); app.UseEndpoints(endpoints => { endpoints.MapControllers(); }); } ``` While testing, we noticed that after a few simultaneous connections, our sessions seem to be failing inconsistently, leading to odd behaviors where users get logged out. I’m wondering if this is a typical issue when scaling with Redis, or if there’s something we might be missing in the configuration. Additionally, we’ve read about session affinity and its importance for retrieving the correct session data, but it feels like a band-aid solution rather than an architectural fix. Is there a better approach or patterns we can implement to ensure our application handles session state efficiently under a heavy load? Any advice on best practices or design patterns specific to ASP.NET Core would be immensely appreciated. Could this be a known issue?