Session timeout… this is the bain of my existence in our classic ASP site.  We set it in global.asa, we set it in IIS 6 (properties > home directory > configuration > options tab “enable session state”)  we setup the application pool to only recycle when we want it to.  But still every now and again we have problems.  Maybe the application pool is reaching its memory limit and recycling anyways?

One problem on a clients server took me ages to figure out.  We had initially setup IIS 6 from our stock standard documented configuration, no surprises, no bells & whistles, just stock standard.  A few months later we started receiving notices that users were being “kicked off” the system and directed to the log in page.  Session time out seemed to be the issue here.

So I checked the usual suspects that I wrote above, and these were all set fine.  I could not actually reproduce this issue when using my local broswer on the site.  After investigating the user’s computer I thought it may be something blocking the asp cookie, or removing it.  But this was a dead end.  I eventually gave up and focussed my efforts back on the server.  But i did end up recording my longest showmypc.com session of 2hours +, hi-5’s all round!  The problem ended up being with the application pool, the sys admins had set the multiple process option in the application pool.

DON’T setup classic ASP sites to use a web garden ( > 1 worker processes in the application pool). If you do this, more than one instance of w3wp.exe is started for a given Application Pool. This means two HTTP requests for a given user using the same application within that application pool may be directed to any of the w3wp.exe instances running that application and session data is not shared between w3wp.exe instances because they are separate processes. In the sys admin’s defence they were trying to improve the performance and scalability of the site.

The purpose for this post is to help point other people in the right direction to set what we have setup, and also to get feedback from other developers out there. Got a suggestion for me? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Working for a company in Australia where a majority of our customers are in a different time zone can be challenging.  Specially when the system you’re working on is web based, so different type of configurations in operating systems, browser versions, caching etc can factor why a system does not function the desired way.  We have the benefit though of having patient users who don’t mind helping us through the issues they have, but when I have a customer on the phone and they are telling me step by step what they’re doing, and I am on my computer following those steps word for word and our outcomes are different…. well… what do you do??  Jump on a 15+ hour flight across the pacific and physically try the process on the users computer?  OK maybe that’s a bit far fetched… maybe if they’re using XP or vista we can enable their machine for remote desktop access?  Yeah… we could… but then you need to have a user account on the machine, make sure their network is open for us to do this, make sure you don’t ruffle the feathers of their IT people…yuuuck…  All I want is a quick 2 minute remote log in and watch the user run through the process, and after all this mess I don’t *think* you can watch a user using remote desktop.

Enter showmypc.com.  I first found out about this site on lifehacker, its fast, secure and simple.  Even the most un-tech savy users have been able to use this system and has saved me hours of extra work and troubleshooting.  There have been some instances where it was the only way I could have possibly debugged a problem, for example there were toolbars installed on a browser that the user wasn’t aware of that was throwing off our system.  I’ve shared this application with the rest of my development team, and in fact our whole company.  I would say it gets used almost every day, and everyone loves it’s simplicity… and now I look like a super star for suggesting it (h).

I was logged onto my Gmail the other day and one after the other, pop-ups of conversations kept appearing.  I’m not saying I’m the world’s most popular guy, it was mostly work related.  So on a Saturday morning my dreams of having a relaxing work free day was smited down like some classic Hollywood battle scene.

I madly scattered around my gmail page and I could not find anywhere in settings to turn off chat while in gmail.  After ironically googling for a way to turn this off and going through endless posts, I found that there is a link right at the bottom of Gmail, “turn off chat”.  I hope this can help someone else!

To turn off your G-talk chat in Gmail:
-  Log onto gmail
-  Scroll to bottom and click the link “turn off chat”