Mongrel Cluster & Memcached Sessions Issues: session is lost

Gents,

I’m having very strange issues in my setup:

front-end: 1 x apache + mod_proxy_balancer
app servers: 12 x mongrels
session store: 1 x memcached (512MB)

I configured both the local session date (stored on memcached) for 29
(seems that it cant be more than 30 days, this is a limitation of
memcached) days of expiration and the session cookies for one year of
expiration but my users still have to login again and again in very
short periods of time.

My environment.rb has:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

Memcache Configuration

memcache_options = { :c_threshold => 10_000,
:compression => true,
:debug => false,
:namespace => ‘mysite.com’,
:readonly => false,
:urlencode => false }

CACHE = MemCache.new(memcache_options)
CACHE.servers = ‘127.0.0.1:10001’

Cache Storage Configuration

config.action_controller.fragment_cache_store = CACHE, {}

Session Storage Configuration

session_options = { :cache => CACHE,
:session_key => ‘_bbsession’,
:session_domain => ‘.mysite.com’,
:session_expires => 3.months.from_now,
:expires => 29.days }
config.action_controller.session_store = :mem_cache_store
ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS.update(session_options)

end

More, I tried to debug that and I could prove that after
leaving/closing the browser and opening it again (not entering the site
yet) both the local (memcached) and remote (cookies) session data is
available, but mongrels don’t find them and then the user needs to login
again.

I’m wondering if this is related to the load balancing or something
else.

Any ideas, suggestions?

Manoel L.
Computer Engineer
Email: [email protected]