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15 Seconds : Sharing Cookies Across Domains
If the user doesn't have a cookie from myserver.com and he requests a page that has cookie.inc included, they will be issued a cookie. This scenario is the best case scenario. If the user doesn't have a cookie from slave.com and he requests a page that has getcookie.inc included and they haven't visited myserver.com then they will have to undergo four redirects and be issued two cookies. This is the worst case scenario. Fortunately, the worst case scenario only happens once. All requests after that do not have to undergo any redirects. In the worst case scenario, it is best to use a technique that produces a random number quickly, because the user will be confused if they see to many redirections on their first page request. The technique of using a COM object to issue a random UID is much quicker then getting a IDENTITY value from SQL Server. Sharing More Then One Cookie The more cookies you try to share with this technique, the harder the problem becomes. It is recommend that you use a different approach to storing state and user information besides cookies. Once you have the UID of the user, you can use the UID to get other information about that user from SQL Server. Using the UID as a primary key to the database enables you to use only one cookie in your web application. This makes the technique mentioned above usable. Web Farms Web farms are more then one Web server serving the same information with the same domain name. Each machine has a separate IP, but the domain name server uses a technique called round-robin to give clients a different IP with every request. Because the clients receive a different IP for every request they are directed to a different server for each page. Web farms distribute the requested load across multiple machines making the site appear faster. Because, session variables are stored in the RAM on each machine, session variables that are set on one machine are not the same on another machine in a web farm. For this reason you can not use session variables in a web farm. However, instead of session variables you can use a cookie which is a primary key to a SQL Server database that stores the state information for the user. As long as all the machines in the web farm are writing to the same SQL Server you can share state information between all the machines in a web farm. And because each machine has the same domain name, the client returns the same cookie to each machine making the distribution of the primary keys a trivial matter.
