How can I keep users from dropping thier session?

Home Grown Stats System w/ Tomcat's JsessionID to identify users

[spthomas]

We have our own in-house stats package that we use to track unique users. We are using the jsession id from tomcat to uniquely identify them. The problem we are having is that for whatever reason, a large percentage of our users get more than one unique session ID while they are on our site. What's the best way to keep track of these people? Is there a way to do it without putting the unique ID in every link on our site?

[scintex]

Hi,

I use JSESSIONID too however haven't had a problem (although I use IBM WebSphere).
Maybe you could lookup what changes in web.xml you could make, specifically around session timeout values?

Are visitors getting assigned different session ids rather quickly, or after a small period of inactivity?

If you are using more that one apps server (i.e. you have a cluster) you may want to read up about session handling in this scenario too.

[spthomas]

I'll check that out. Is it possible that certain browsers are doing this to me, similar to the way people often lose the referring domain of their users?

[scintex]

Its possible although Ive never had a problem. As it's passed in the header (the JSESSIONID) then maybe something is filtering that out, causing tomcat to issue a new ID as it thinks it is a new session