Why do I Need a Sticky Session?
The Strategy application wants the underlying user session of the Intelligence Server to be created once and then reused thereafter by the user. This allows for the best performance of the Strategy platform and avoids session timeout errors, such as Your user session has timed out due to inactivity, which is caused by redirecting to a new web server node from the load balancer.
The sticky session method ensures that the user is always directed to the same web server node. Inside that web server are data structures that hold onto the user session information of the Intelligence Server. Then, each time the user interacts with the web server node (in that login session), the data structures are accessed to pull out the user sessions information of the Intelligence Server.
Set enableMultiProjectsSessionsWithSSO to True (1)
Since 10.4, Strategy introduced a new setting called enableMultiProjectsSessionsWithSSO in the system_defaults.xml file under the folder ...\<Web deployment folder>\WEB-INF\xml, which decides whether to allow multi-project sessions for a single SSO user or not. In order to make sticky session work well, please make sure set it to true (1), like the following:
<pr des="whether to enable multiple projects sessions with Single Sign On" n="enableMultiProjectsSessionsWithSSO" scp="system" v="1" dt="boolean"/>
The load on the cluster of the Intelligence Servers is balanced independently of Sticky Sessions at the level of web server nodes, so load balancing is not affected.
The load on the web server nodes, even when using Sticky Sessions, is still balanced. Again, it is a matter of granularity. Due to the nature of sticky session method, it is impossible to dynamically direct every browser's requests to the least loaded web server node. But, when the browser makes its initial call to the web servers, it will be load balanced.
As a result, it is recommend to enable sticky session in the web application load balancer and then set the timeout of the sticky session to a reasonable period your business cases prefer.
KB482933
