In a multi-server deployment, what is the impact of not ensuring stickiness in the load balancer configuration?

In a multi-server PingAM deployment that uses the Core Token Service (CTS) for centralized session management, session stickiness is not strictly required for functionality but is critical for performance. Without stickiness, a user's requests can be distributed across different servers. Each time a request hits a server that does not have the session in its local memory cache, it must perform a remote lookup to the CTS store to retrieve the session data. This increases network latency and adds significant load to the CTS infrastructure, thereby decreasing overall system performance.

A. With a centralized CTS store, session failover works without stickiness because any server can retrieve the session from the CTS. Stickiness just makes it more efficient.

B. The browser is not responsible for validating the session; it only sends the session cookie. The server performs the validation.

C. Increased redirects would typically occur if sessions were lost entirely (e.g., with in-memory sessions and no stickiness), but the primary impact in a CTS deployment is performance.

1. Ping Identity Access Management Documentation, "Load balancing". (Path: Deployment > Preparing for installation). This section states, "For best performance, PingAM recommends configuring your load balancer for session stickiness... Without session stickiness, PingAM must read session information from the CTS store more often, which can affect performance."

2. Ping Identity Access Management Documentation, "CTS and session failover". (Path: Reference > Core Token Service (CTS)). This section explains how the CTS enables session failover and the role of server-side session caches, which are optimized by session stickiness.