Old sessions on EG

[iscgonzalez]

Hello,

I would like to know if there is any downside on keeping EG opened (with the same session) for many days. We used to have SAS 9.3 and because of network configuration, the inactive sessions were disconnected after a couple hours because of a timeout on the connection. Recently we moved to SAS 9.4 and I configured the keep alive option to avoid that problem. But now I see that the users are keeping their EG opened for many days. Is there any possible problem that they could experience with this way of working?

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @iscgonzalez, 

Yes and no... Hypothetically, there should not be an issue, however in practice, all of those open sessions (which might be just ghost sessions in some cases) they are just consuming resources, and I do think it is not a good practice to have user sessions open for days, for several good reasons: performance, security, etc etc.

In some of those scenarios, I have scripts to kill user sessions that are longer than x hours, or days. Of course, first you would like to communicate this to the users and your security team, and you agree on the terms for this policy before.

[TomKari · Accepted solution]

I generally discourage this behaviour, for 3 reasons:

1. The SAS server session presumably does consume some server resources, although I would imagine they are minimal when nothing is executing.

2. If something happens on the stack (PC, network, server), and the connection is lost, there's a risk of losing work (e.g. work files will be lost). Once you get into the habit of expecting everything to be available, it's easy to get out of the mindset of ensuring that things are appropriately saved.

3. It happens from time to time that something does happen on the stack, resulting in "orphaned" server sessions. Some organizations clean up (deliberately kill) SAS server sessions that have been active for a long time. Of course, if your users are leaving an EG session up for days, there's no way to do this.

I don't consider any of these issues serious enough to ban the practice, but I wouldn't do it myself.

Tom

[iscgonzalez]

Thanks for the reasons, it gives me a good points when having "the talk" with the users about why it is discouraged this behaviour