Tomcat sessions expiring unexpectedly

Question

We are running tomcat application server that handle over 100 concurrent sessions. In the last 2 months the most active users noticed that sometimes they are getting kicked

Answer 1

Eventhough I do not know the cause of the problem, one possible fix (which I had done at my previous project) would be to run the application on a tomcat cluster and have session failover. Sessions can be by default sticky and when one node goes down, the healthy nodes pick up the sessions and all this is transparent to the end user.

Answer 2

there is a timeout, that you can configure in your web.xml:

<web-app>
  ...
  <session-config>
    <session-timeout>-1</session-timeout> 
  </session-config>
</web-app>

use -1 for no timeout

Answer 3

You can search Tomcat's bug database, but it would be better to have another look at your web application first. The chances that there is something wrong with Tomcat are very low.

Try to investigate what causes session invalidation. Are you using filters? Do you have cross-context requests? Try adding logging information for every request to find out, when exactly the session is lost.