How do Large Scale Web Service Applications Maintain Session State?

I've been looking at two approaches for the maintenance of Session state for
a Web Service application.

One approach uses the old familiar Session object which I've used in the
past for Web applications. As far as I can see, the Session approach is
non-standard since Web Services are supposed to be agnostic with respect to
their clients. It seems that cookies are outside the Web Service standard;
therefore, such a Web Service application won't work for those clients which
are not equipped to shuttle the Session cookie back and forth.

The second approach I have researched uses the Context.Cache object, plus a
unique session ID which is shuttled back and forth as a parameter on every
method call. The unique session ID is of course, the index into the Cache
object for the retrieval of session related data. I see two drawbacks to
this approach. The first issue, is that this approach affects the parameter
signature practically every single public method in the entire application.
OK, this is perhaps a minor detail. For all I know, this may be standard
practice?

The second issue however, is that for a large scale Web Services
application, supporting thousands of concurrent sessions, the Cache memory
consumption on the server is liable to be quite large and this could be a
problem.

So I'm wondering, what is the best way to do this?

Tangentially, I'm also curious how you typically engineer your Web Service
applications. Would the server side application consist of a single ASMX
page with all application methods in a single page, or would you break your
application into separate pages? I'm thinking that from the standpoint of
team development alone, the latter method is the correct approach.

I appreciate any advice which you can offer.

Thanks!

Joseph Geretz


.

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