Professional ASP.NET 1.1 [Electronic resources]

Manage Your Session State

Use sessions where they are actually required for the application. Turn them off in pages that don't require access to them. Alternatively, use read-only session state where you don't need to update the values.

To disable session state maintenance for a page, use the following Page directive:

<%@ Page EnableSessionState="false" %>

To disable session state maintenance for an entire application, change the setting in web.config:

<sessionState mode="off" />
<pages enableSessionState="false" ... />

To specify read-only session state maintenance for a page, use the following Page directive:

<%@ Page EnableSessionState="ReadOnly" %>

To specify read-only session state maintenance for an entire application, change the setting in web.config:

<pages enableSessionState="ReadOnly" ... />

Wherever possible, use the default in-process session management. The out-of-process state service can produce a performance hit of 20 percent over the in-process session manager, and the remote SQL Server state management session adds around another 50 percent performance hit over out-of-process session state management – use it only for a web farm.