Session inactivity timeouts are used to detect abandoned sessions and free server resources by deleting those sessions. For example, each active service program counts against the BIS Service Engine use count. If abandoned sessions are allowed to idle for an excessively long time, there may be a number of idle service programs consuming resources that could be recycled to handle new requests. The purpose of the session inactivity timeout is to free those resources.
To detect abandoned sessions, BIS stores the time the most recent request was received in the session. At various intervals, BIS determines if a session has been inactive longer than the timeout period set for the session. If so, the session is released.
There are two ways to indicate proactively that a session is complete and may be released:
In all cases, the session is not released until it is inactive; that is, all services within the session have ended and there are no active requests using the session.