There is a maximum of one (1) SessionIdManager per Jetty Server instance. Its purpose is to generate fresh, unique session ids and to coordinate the re-use of session ids amongst co-operating contexts.

Unlike in previous versions of Jetty, the SessionIdManager is agnostic with respect to the type of clustering technology chosen.

Jetty provides a default implementation - the DefaultSessionIdManager - which should meet the needs of most users. If you do not explicitly enable one of the session modules or otherwise configure a SessionIdManager, the DefaultSessionIdManager will be used.

If the DefaultSessionIdManager does not meet your needs, you can extend the org.eclipse.jetty.server.session.AbstractSessionIdManager or do a fresh implementation of the org.eclipse.jetty.server.session.SessionIdManager interface.

See Configuring the SessionIdManager and HouseKeeper for details on configuration.

There is a maximum of one (1) HouseKeeper per SessionIdManager. Its purpose is to periodically poll the SessionHandlers to clean out expired sessions.

By default the HouseKeeper will poll the SessionHandlers every 10 mins to find and delete expired sessions, although this interval is configurable.

See Configuring the SessionIdManager and HouseKeeper for details on configuration.

There is one (1) SessionCache per context. Its purpose is to provide an L1 cache of Session objects. Having a working set of Session objects in memory allows multiple simultaneous requests for the same session to share the same Session object.

Jetty provides two (2) SessionCache implementations: the DefaultSessionCache and the NullSessionCache. The DefaultSessionCache retains Session objects in memory in a cache and has a number of configuration options to control cache behavior. It is the default that is used if no other SessionCache has been configured. It is suitable for non-clustered and clustered deployments with a sticky load balancer, as well as clustered deployments with a non-sticky load balancer, with some caveats.

The NullSessionCache does not actually cache any objects: each request uses a fresh Session object. It is suitable for clustered deployments without a sticky load balancer and non-clustered deployments when purely minimal support for sessions is needed.

SessionCaches always write out a Session to the SessionDataStore whenever the last request for the Session exits.

They can also be configured to do an immediate, eager write of a freshly created session. This can be useful if you are likely to experience multiple, near simultaneous requests referencing the same session, e.g. with HTTP/2 and you don’t have a sticky load balancer. Alternatively, if the eager write is not done, application paths which create and then invalidate a session within a single request never incur the cost of writing to persistent storage.

Additionally, if the EVICT_ON_INACTIVITY eviction policy is in use, you can configure the DefaultSessionCache to force a write of the Session to the SessionDataStore just before the Session is evicted.

See the L1 Session Cache for more information.

There is one (1) SessionDataStore per context. Its purpose is to handle all persistence related operations on sessions.

The common characteristics for all SessionDataStores are whether or not they support passivation, and the length of the grace period.

Supporting passivation means that session data is serialized. Some persistence mechanisms serialize, such as JDBC, GCloud Datastore etc, whereas others may store an object in shared memory, e.g. Infinispan, when configured with a local cache.

Whether or not a clustering technology entails passivation controls whether or not the session passivation/activation listeners will be called.

The grace period is an interval, configured in seconds, that attempts to deal with the non-transactional nature of sessions with regard to finding sessions that have expired. Due to the lack of transactionality, in a clustered configuration, even with a sticky load balancer, it is always possible that a Session is live on a node but has not yet been updated in the persistent store. When SessionDataStores search their persistent store to find sessions that have expired, they typically perform a few sequential searches:

Jetty instantiates the trivial NullSessionDataStore - which does not persist sessions - as the default.

The distribution provides a number of alternative SessionDataStore implementations such as FileSessionDataStore, GCloudSessionDataStore, JDBCSessionDataStore, MongoSessionDataStore, InfinispanSessionDataStore, HazelcastSessionDataStore.

The CachingSessionDataStore is a special type of SessionDataStore that inserts an L2 cache of Session data - the SessionDataMap - in front of a delegate SessionDataStore. The SessionDataMap is preferentially consulted before the actual SessionDataStore on reads. This can improve the performance of slow stores.

Jetty provides one implementation of the this L2 cache based on Memcached, the MemcachedSessionDataMap.

See the L2 SessionData Cachefor additional information.