Is it possible to recycle IIS application pools without losing user sessions?

Question

We\'re currently deploying code to live pretty reguarly at the moment, but the down side is destroying user session data.

Is there a way of being able to recycle IIS

Answer 1

In-memory session state is stored in the memory of the IIS worker process. When you restart the application pool you are effectively stopping and restarting the worker process, so whatever state is held by the worker process, including all session objects, is lost. So, yes, you need store session data outside the IIS worker process, such as in SQL, in order to not "destroy" users' session data.