CSS 11501 Proxy Server Sticky Problem

[maldaer2005]

Attached is my current configuration. This is working for 99% of our clients, however we have one group of clients coming through a proxy server and unpredictable stickiness results are happening. Sometimes they will be able to navigate through the site without any problems and at other times, it will lose the sticky connection for no apparent reason.

Traffic peaks at about 600 concurrent sessions for the DB heavy Java App running on Tomcat. As you can see from the config file I use the built in tomcat session cookie in association with the jvmRoute attribute to configure my stickiness. I used to use Apaches mod jk load balancer and these clients didn't have a problem with this, but with this configuration on the CSS they are having these issues.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I am at a loss and my clients are getting upset.

[Gilles Dufour]

the problem is that a proxy most often multiplex many clients into one connection.

The CSS will normally parse every request and forwards it to the appropriate server.

However, if the proxy connection stays idle for a while, the CSS will keep the connection open but it will stop parsing requests and send all clients to the same server until the connection is finally cleaned by the css.

The solution is to configure a 'flow-timeout-multiplier 20' under your content rule.

This should help.

If not 100% fixed, try to increae the value from 20 to 100.

Regards,

Gilles.

[maldaer2005]

Many thanks for the response but unfortunately this didn't fix the problem. Is there anything else that you can think of pertaining to proxy servers that could maybe cause this strange behavior.

Regards,

Matt

[Gilles Dufour]

Matt,

that's the only possible problem I can think of.

Could you capture a sniffer trace showing the problem.

We can get a better understanding of what's going on like this and make the necessary adjustments.

Gilles.