.net – Selective Cache clearing across load balanced servers (ASP.Net)

There is one issue. The cookies are encrypted and validated using the machine key and the validation key (that's what protection="All" means). You will have to set those in your top-level web.config in all the servers, otherwise each of them will have a different one and will reject cookies set by the others.

You can find a machineKey generator here. Then put the generated xml inside in the web.config of all the servers and you're ready to rock.

If your page does not modify any session variables, you can opt out of most of this lock.

<% @Page EnableSessionState="ReadOnly" %>

If your page does not read any session variables, you can opt out of this lock entirely, for that page.

<% @Page EnableSessionState="False" %>

If none of your pages use session variables, just turn off session state in the web.config.

<sessionState mode="Off" />

I'm curious, what do you think "a ThreadSafe collection" would do to become thread-safe, if it doesn't use locks?

Edit: I should probably explain by what I mean by "opt out of most of this lock". Any number of read-only-session or no-session pages can be processed for a given session at the same time without blocking each other. However, a read-write-session page can't start processing until all read-only requests have completed, and while it is running it must have exclusive access to that user's session in order to maintain consistency. Locking on individual values wouldn't work, because what if one page changes a set of related values as a group? How would you ensure that other pages running at the same time would get a consistent view of the user's session variables?

I would suggest that you try to minimize the modifying of session variables once they have been set, if possible. This would allow you to make the majority of your pages read-only-session pages, increasing the chance that multiple simultaneous requests from the same user would not block each other.