HttpSession vs. Stateful Session Bean ---- when State Session is large

Question

I hope most of the people come across with this issue where to put the state
for the internet/intranet based applications when they are using
servlet/jsps calling session beans. Weblogic 4.5.1 does support httpsession
in-memory replication for the servlets but the stateful session beans are
not replicated in clustered environment. Plus with stateful bean u get
activation/passivation overhead too. So one tempts to use stateless session
beans and store state in httpsession?
Then what is the upper limit for the session state one can put in
HttpSession with the weblogic? Is there any way to configure it?
One way to overcome the httpsession size limitation is to use database for
storing state and just store some unique Ids for the session info in
httpSession. But then there will be overhead for database connection?(jdbc
connection pool can provide some help here). So what is the recommended way
for doing this provided few thousand concurrent clients with session size
say exceeding 4kb per client?
Thanks
Usmani

Answer 1

There are no special setting in sun-ejb-jar.xml regarding cache settings. The default settings from server.xml are used:
    <jdbc-connection-pool steady-pool-size="8" max-pool-size="32" max-wait-time-in-millis="60000" pool-resize-quantity="2" idle-timeout-in-seconds="300" is-isolation-level-guaranteed="false" is-connection-validation-required="false" connection-validation-method="auto-commit" fail-all-connections="false" datasource-classname="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource" name="ebs">
      <property value="jdbc:oracle:thin:@myebsdbsserver:1521:ebsdevdb" name="url"/>
      <property value="ebs" name="user"/>
      <property value="ebs" name="password"/>
    </jdbc-connection-pool>
  <ejb-container steady-pool-size="32" pool-resize-quantity="16" max-pool-size="64" cache-resize-quantity="32" max-cache-size="512" pool-idle-timeout-in-seconds="600" cache-idle-timeout-in-seconds="600" removal-timeout-in-seconds="5400" victim-selection-policy="nru" commit-option="B" monitoring-enabled="true">
     </ejb-container>The Session Bean uses Container Managed Transaction. Is it possible in this case, that the bean isn't 'idle enough' in order to set into passivated?