Question
Were there any refinements to the auto logout process in 6.8?
Background
We have 6.7 in production with 6.8 being tested against all the custom add-ons a doodads we've implemented... We're hoping for some improvement in how ARS handles excessive idle web sessions.
Our typical help desk usage - keeps open several TABS in IE to differnt web forms or OUs. The same group is responsible for User and Computer account creation. It's not uncommon to see two or three tabs open to ARS on their screen. We don't discourage the practice since they've proven the increased productivity of doing so. We have 3 thousand on the help desk and a hundred thousand each of users and their laptops/desktops. So multiply 3000 x 3 tabs and with 1000's of calls a day, that makes for a good workout of our ARS services.
They are not as efficient at logging out of ARS before locking/shutting down/leaving.
We have the ARS trinity ( Admin svc, SQL, IIS ) each on seperate servers. We've noticed in ARS 6.7 that the session scavenging that goes on with regard to 'client sessions' isn't completely reliable. Reminds me a bit of the old zombie processes in Unix that wouldn't go awawy until you booted the box. If you touch that session in the client sessions interface - you get a pop-up error and poof it disappears - sometimes. Sometimes, they just hang out there ... never disappearing ... like the walking dead.
We implemented a 1 hour timeout which our users (and ARS team members) found too aggressive - and we conceded and backed off to 3 hour timeouts for their purposes with a 5 minute warning.
In 6.7, Whichever timeout period was chosen - the session cleanup was inconsistent with some getting cleared - but ARS allowing some others to just linger.
I am assuming that when the end user acknowledges the timeout warning and gets logged out - that ARS initiates a command to disconnect the session in ARS and IIS .. am I close? And that when the user chooses to X out of the warning window/logout notice - that ARS doesn't get a chance to call the code to perform that disconnect - hence the zombie sessions?
Is that process improved in 6.8 - or does anyone have alternative suggesions for putting these poor forgotten sessions out of their misery?