Count Active Sessions in ASP.Net

In order to monitor load on a site I've built and support, I wanted to add a simple counter to show how many active sessions were currently being handled by the web application.

The first technique was to use a counter variable held in the Application context. This was pretty straightforward - in global.asax increment the counter in the Session_Start event and decrement in the Session_End:

  1   Sub Session_Start(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)

  2 

  3       'Increment session count

  4       Application.Lock()

  5       Application("SessionCount") += 1

  6       Application.UnLock()

  7 

  8   End Sub

  9 

   10   Sub Session_End(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)

   11 

   12       'Decrement session count

   13       Application.Lock()

   14       Application("SessionCount") = Application("SessionCount") - 1

   15       Application.UnLock()

   16 

   17   End Sub

Unfortunately this didn't turn out to be accurate in my case as I was using out of process session state, using State Server. This is a method of using an external service for the management of sessions, which is often a good idea as it means that user's session information will survive application restarts caused by uploading new .dlls or modifying the web.config file.

So instead made use of a performance counter, reading it's value in code for display in a web page:

  1   Private Sub DisplaySessionCount()

  2       Dim pc As PerformanceCounter

  3       Dim dblSessions As Double = 0

  4       If PerformanceCounterCategory.CounterExists("State Server Sessions Active", "ASP.NET") Then

  5           pc = New PerformanceCounter("ASP.NET", "State Server Sessions Active")

  6           dblSessions = pc.NextValue()

  7       End If

  8       lblSessionCount.Text = dblSessions.ToString()

  9   End Sub

There's a gotcha in that as it stands this will lead to a security exception. To avoid you need to add the website account (e.g. IUSR_MACHINENAME if IIS anonymous access and identity impersonate are being used), to the Performance Monitor and Perfomance Log groups under Computer Management > Local Users and Groups.