figuring out why asp.net authentication ticket is expiring

Question

I need help figuring out why my authentication ticket is expiring after about an hour on my hosted website. But if I run the site locally the authentication ticket stays ali

Answer 1

I added a machinekey entry in system.net. Something like this:

and now it keeps the user logged in. However, now it seems like I am having performance issues. The page used to take roughly 500ms to load now takes about double that time.