A mechanism for enabling session information to be shared across multiple processes
in a multi-process environment is disclosed. There is provided a shared persistent
memory-mapped file in a file system, which is mapped to the memory space of each
of the processes. This file is used by all of the processes to store session information.
Because the memory space of each process is mapped to the shared file, each process
is able to access and manipulate all of the sessions in the system. Thus, sessions
are no longer maintained on a process-specific basis. Rather, they are maintained
on a centralized, shared basis. As a result, different requests pertaining to the
same session may be serviced by different server processes without any adverse
effects. Each process will be able to access and manipulate all of the state information
pertaining to that session. By enabling session information to be shared, this
mechanism eliminates the session management errors experienced by the prior art.