How to disable u201Csticky sessionu201D for the particular web application?

Question

Hi All,
Is there a possibility to disable so called u201Csticky sessionu201D for the particular web application? We have deployed a WAR file with the Axis 1.4 based web service into SAP NW 7.1. The web service works fine but when the client makes SOAP request the server creates a so-called u201Cstickyu201D HTTP session with the default (30 minutes) timeout. Such u201Csessionsu201D are created on each SOAP request from the same client. The maximum number for Java Web Sessions (SAP Management Console) is 1000. After a while the clients start getting the u201C503 Service not availableu201D errors:
503 Service not available.
Error: -6
Version: 7010
Component: ICM Java
Date/Time: Tue Mar 03 14:30:12 2009 
Module: http_j2ee2.c
Line: 1166
Server: XXXXXXXXXXX
Error Tag:
Detail: server overload: no more sessions available
The only way to improve the situation we found so far was to set session timeout to 1 minute. That u201Csticky sessionu201D will still be created, though.
This is a testing environment and we do not use any hardware/software loadbalancer. 
Any help/advice is appreciated. (Please let me know if you need more information.)
Thanks,
Dmitry Vasilenko

Answer 1

The practical workaround we finally come up with for this problem was to create a servlet filter and map it to the AxisServlet. The servlet filter will invalidate the HTTP session and effectively destroy the sticky session created by the server on each SOAP request.
Here is the fragment from the web.xml
<filter>
  <filter-name>StickySessionFilter</filter-name>
  <filter-class>com.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxx.services.StickySessionFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
  <filter-name> StickySessionFilter </filter-name>
  <servlet-name>AxisServlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>
<servlet>
  <servlet-name>AxisServlet</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
The doFilter() method looks like this:
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
       try {
              chain.doFilter(request, response);
       } finally {
                     javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest httpRequest = (javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest)request;
                     javax.servlet.http.HttpSession session = httpRequest.getSession();
                     session.invalidate();
Thanks,
Dmitry Vasilenko