I'm studying for a MS certification and one of the practice tests I'm doing has a question where the point of contention is the performance between storing the session in SQL Server as opposed to StateServer.
Given the app is running in a web farm, which solution for session state gives the best performance (SQL Server or StateServer) and most importantly, why?
See Question&Answers more detail:os
State Server is faster because it stores session data in an in-memory dictionary. SQL Server is slower because it's stored in a database which persists data to disk.
SQL server is also slower because everything is stored in one table which leads to contention as more and more clients access/update the session data.
SQL server is more reliable because it is persisted to disk and can be set up as a cluster with failover capability.
See the preamble in this article for an indepth explanation.
