ASP.NET mvc auth or session expires quicker than set

Question

In my ASP.NET MVC5 website the login and session timeout in web.config are as follows:

    <system.web>
      <authentication mode="Forms">
        <forms loginUrl="~/Account/Login" slidingExpiration="true" timeout="60"/>
      </authentication>
      <sessionState mode="InProc" timeout="60"/>      
    </system.web>

Still the session or authentication times out in five minutes. I have approached my web hosting provider to increase the timeout in IIS and they shared a screenshot after increasing the timeout in IIS, but nothing changed.

Any idea why this is happening?

Answer 1

It was an issue with the SystemIdleTime variable in the IIS. I requested my hosting provider to increase this value to 30 minutes and it worked.

It indicates that all my session variables would erase as the application pool shuts down when there is no request for 30 minutes. This value would override the session's timeout set in the website's web.cofig. You could set it to 0 to indicate that the application pool will never shut down and then you could sontrol the session's timeout through web.config. I also found this good article –