Experts Please: Forgetful IIS 6

[oppcos]

Hi,
I'm having a bizarre problem where the session data in IIS is being (seemingly) randomly lost, and often temporarily at that. ASP.Net is storing a cookie on the client that specifies the session ID, but that ID comes and goes as far as the server is concerned. I will click on an ASP report and it suddenly thinks the user is no longer logged in, only to refresh the page and have it re-remember the session info. Has anyone run into anything like this before? It is driving me absolutely batty.

Would the application pool have anything to do with it. The only thing we can think of is one of our techs was playing around in there but he thinks he set everything back (but isn't 100% sure). I've been beating the code up for two solid weeks now and am positive it isn't a coding issue, not the least reason being that the issue came up in code that has worked consistently for a year and a half without modifications.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Sheco]

Are you certain that the browser is actually sending the cookie info with every HTTP Request?

Is it possible that your web application is spread across a server farm so that 2 different servers are answering the Requests?

 

[oppcos]

It is sort of acting like it is spread amongst multiple servers, but there is only one. (Is it possilbe of IIS to be running with two instances at once?)

I've tried it on several different browser types (IE, Firefox, Opera) and on half a dozen different computers all with the same, terribly odd results. I've checked and the cookie is always created and retained successfully. Sometimes it is like the POST data from the login form doesn't get sent though, like it gets lost too. It is, again, totally random and has about a 50% chance of working just fine. I hate bugs that aren't consistent. It is just a handful of pretty quiet sites, so the server isn't under too much stress.

Event logs include nothing unusual, just services starting up succesfully, etc.

I'm on the brink of backing everything up and just rebuilding the server..

 

[Sheco]

Is there some sort of web page proxy/cache/accellerator thingy in between the user and the server?

 

[oppcos]

Nope. Also, internal users (those on the network) and external users all experience the same issue.

 

[Sheco]

Well I'm stumped.

Losing the session is one thing... having a lost session randomly come back is really freaky!

 

[oppcos]

Me too. Thanks for trying. I just had another weird symptom. I tried to log in as one user and it immediately "forgot" so I logged in as myself and I was suddenly logged in as the previous person..

 

[Sheco]

What if you actually log into the server and browse from there?

 

[oppcos]

Tried that and I get the same, evil effect