session problem - sessions disappear randomly

[Ralph Grove <gr...@jmu.edu>]

I have an application running with tomcat 3.2.2 that is dropping sessions at
random, i.e., the HttpSession getSession() method occassionally returns null
for active sessions.

The application maintains user dialogs by binding certain application
objects to sessions. It uses URL-rewriting to accomodate browsers that don't
allow cookies. Everything works fine when cookies are allowed, but when
cookies are not allowed by the browser, sessions are dropped at random.

The session timeout is set to the default 30 min, though the sessions are
dropped in a matter of seconds. I've tried raising the default heap size and
have tried running the application on Windows and Unix servers, but get the
same results in any case.

Any suggestions or information would be appreciated.

Ralph Grove
groverf@jmu.edu