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WAS Session Management Configuration

WebSphere Application Server V5 provides a large number of options for configuring the behavior of the session manager portion of the runtime. The default is for these options to apply to all applications running inside a given application server, but they can also be configured on a case-by-case basis for each enterprise application running on an application server or web applications within an enterprise application. By tuning at the application level, you ensure that the application behaves in the same fashion, regardless of the configuration of the application server. Customization of the session manager for a web application or enterprise application is performed by selecting the Overwrite Session Management check box for the enterprise application or web application, as shown in Figure 22-4.

Figure 22.4Figure 22-4 Overwriting session management for an EAR or web application.

The Configuration tab depicting the Overwrite property is located on the Session Manager dialog for both the enterprise application and web applications, which is reached from the administration console by navigating to Applications > Enterprise Applications > Additional Properties > Session Management. In cases where you want to overwrite the properties for a web application, the dialog is reached by selecting the Web Modules > Session Management for a specific enterprise application. All of the options described here can be configured specifically to a web application or enterprise application, so as an example, one application in an application server could persist session to a database, while other applications could use memory-to-memory replication.

Local and Distributed Session Options

The default with WAS V5 is to store the HTTP session object locally as part of the application server JVM. WAS also provides for distributed sessions that can be replicated in memory to other application servers or persisted to a database. Distributed sessions provide for failover of the session object to a surviving application server in the case of an application server outage. Through the use of cookies or URL rewriting, WAS provides affinity so that requests from a specific browser return to the application server where the session object was initially created. The configuration options common to both local and distributed sessions are depicted in Figure 22-5, though the meaning for some of these varies on whether local or distributed sessions are in use.

This dialog is reached by navigating to Application Servers > application server name > Web Container > Session Management in the administration browser client.

Figure 22.5Figure 22-5 Session management configuration.

Maximum Session Count and Allow Overflow

The next two parameters on this dialog are for the maximum number of session objects stored in memory and whether the maximum can be exceeded. This allows you to limit the memory footprint of sessions stored locally or in local cache when distributed sessions are in use. When local sessions are in use, the session count specifies the number of sessions that are stored in memory, assuming that you do not specify "Allow Overflow." When Allow Overflow is specified and local sessions are in use, a second session memory table is constructed, and all sessions greater than the specified maximum are stored there, up to the available memory for the JVM. For distributed sessions, when Allow Overflow is specified, the session manager employs a Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm so that only the most recently used sessions, up to the maximum count, are kept in the local cache, with the remainder of the session objects either replicated in memory to a remote application server or persisted to a database depending on your configuration. Specifying Allow Overflow should probably never be configured. Doing so removes the limiting mechanism that it provides. As a result, the number of session objects could grow to consume the entire application server JVM, either as the result of a spike in load or as the result of a denial of service attack.

Session Timeout

As its name implies, the Session Timeout parameter specifies how long an unused session exists before it times out and is removed from the memory table for local sessions or the cache for distributed sessions. This setting is an important one from a performance perspective because of the memory impact that unused sessions can have on the application server JVM until they are removed. In the same vein, specifying "No Timeout" can result in a memory leak since the session objects are never eligible for garbage collection by the JVM, unless the application explicitly calls session.invalidate(). As a result, No Timeout is generally not recommended, though it might be appropriate for a small percentage of applications where the user population is very small and stable. In order to minimize the memory impact of session objects, this setting should be set as low as practical in order to satisfy application requirements and use patterns. For applications with a large number of short-lived visits of perhaps a few minutes, a timeout of 5–10 minutes would likely be appropriate. Some web sites even provide a timer to show when the current session will expire and a logout function that invalidates the session.

Session Security Integration

When "Security Integration" is enabled, WAS checks the user ID of the HTTP request against the user ID for the session object as part of the processing of the request.getSession() method. If the check fails, an UnauthorizedSessionRequestException is thrown. When used in conjunction with SSL, Security Integration can be used to prevent "man in the middle" intrusions. Thus, when architecting a secure infrastructure, it's recommended that this option be employed.

Serialize Session Access

This option is somewhat misnamed since, when specified, the session manager actually synchronizes access to a session inside a JVM in order to provide thread-safe access to the session object. Prior to WAS V3.5.3, this was the default for session access, but in order to improve performance, the responsibility for thread safety was shifted from the runtime to the application developer. For best performance, it's recommended that applications continue to take appropriate measures inside the application to ensure thread safety rather than relying on this option. This means that application code must be careful when modifying a session to ensure that multiple threads don't simultaneously modify the same session object in conflicting ways. This is most likely to occur in web applications that use frames where multiple Servlets are executing on behalf of the same client simultaneously. This is fairly easy to prevent by ensuring that only one of the Servlets in the frame modifies the session and the others only read from it.

Shared Session Context

Before leaving the session management options, there is one additional option that can be configured in the Application Server Toolkit (ASTK), WebSphere Studio, or the Application Assembly Tool (AAT). This is a J2EE extension that allows for the session object to be shared across the multiple Servlet contexts inside a single enterprise application. While this is a useful option when migrating pre-J2EE applications (Servlet 2.1) to J2EE compliance, we recommend that this be avoided if at all possible. Sharing session in this fashion tends to lead to large session objects that in turn are usually detrimental to application performance. This option is enabled in the ASTK or Studio by selecting the check box indicated in Figure 22-6.

Figure 22.6Figure 22-6 Session sharing option in ASTK.

Distributed Sessions

As previously noted, distributed sessions provide for failover in case of application server outage, allowing an end user to continue using a web site without any loss of an application state that could require a re-login or navigation through previously viewed pages. While local sessions only provide for a single copy of the session object, distributed sessions provide at least one copy of the session object in addition to the local copy that is cached in the application server JVM. It's worth mentioning that aside from ensuring that the information placed into the HTTP session is serializable, there's no impact to application development when choosing to use this option.

Session Affinity

Strictly speaking, session affinity isn't an option; it's the default behavior for WAS, but before discussing the other session-management settings in WAS, it's important to have some understanding of how WebSphere Application Server implements this feature. Session affinity allows WAS to return requests associated with a given browser and session object back to the same application server instance in a clustered environment. This in turn aids performance by allowing sessions to be accessed from the cache in the application server when distributed sessions are in use and allows local sessions to be utilized in cases where session failover is not a requirement. Without affinity, browser requests would be distributed across all application servers in a cluster. The impact of requests being distributed in this fashion would depend on whether distributed or local sessions were in use. In an environment using distributed sessions, the application server would make an out-of-process request to retrieve the session object from the copy of the session object stored either in memory in another application server or in a database. In an environment employing local sessions, the getSession() method call in the application code would result in the creation of a new session object, with the loss of any data previously stored in session for that client.

In a clustered environment, WAS provides affinity to a server by appending the server ID to the session ID that is contained in the JSESSIONID cookie or URL rewrite. This information is used by the HTTP server plug-in to dispatch the request to the correct server. This can be seen by looking at the request header for the HTTP request via a programmatic call to request. getHeader("Cookie"), which will return the JSESSIONID cookie with a result similar to 0001kJLEJhMoitCnI0QTgAo5z8z:v1efc643. The first four characters are the cache ID, followed by the session ID, then a ":" for a separator, followed by the server clone ID. In this case, v1efc643 is the server clone ID, which corresponds to the application server defined in the plugin-cfg.xml file with the Server CloneID="v1efc643" property.

Distribution Mechanisms

In order to maintain session state across multiple application servers, some mechanism for distribution of the session object is required. That way, if one application server should fail, when the request is routed to another application server, that server can obtain the state from a remote persistent store. In looking at the link to the Distributed Environment Settings dialog (see Figure 22-7), you'll note the word "persistence," which is probably not the best term for this, but it has been used historically, so we continue to use it here, even though only one of the options provides persistence. Keep in mind that sessions are not intended for long-term stable storage. The lifetime of their "persistence" is essentially the lifetime of the client browser. In any case, WAS provides two persistence mechanisms for maintaining session state: database and memory to memory. The dialog for configuration of Distributed Sessions is accessed from Distributed Environment Settings under the Additional Properties heading at the bottom of the session configuration dialog, as shown in Figure 22-7.

Figure 22.7Figure 22-7 Link to Distributed Environment Settings dialog.

This in turn leads to the dialog depicted in Figure 22-8, where the options for Distributed Sessions are specified.

Figure 22.8Figure 22-8 Session distribution options.

The default of "None" is depicted, with options for "Database" and "Memory to Memory Replication." If your web site requires that application state be maintained in the event of a server outage, you will want to provide for failover by selecting one of the two options. The decision on which option is appropriate for your environment will depend on several factors, which we'll explore, but first let's discuss how each of these options is implemented and configured.

Database Session Persistence

When a database is used for session failover, the WAS session manager uses a database table to store a copy of the session object. This is depicted in Figure 22-9. Each application server maintains a local cache of the session object with a copy maintained in the database.

Figure 22.9Figure 22-9 Database session persistence.

In the event that one of the application servers were to go offline, requests would be directed to the surviving application servers, and when the application calls the getSession() method, the session object is retrieved from the database and placed in the local cache.

By selecting the Database option shown in Figure 22-8, the session database dialog is displayed, as shown in Figure 22-10.

Figure 22.10Figure 22-10 Configuring a database for session persistence.

At a minimum, you need to supply a JNDI name for a data source that corresponds to a database to be used, as well as the database user ID and password to be used for accessing the database. Note that when specifying the data source, it should be a non-XA data source. This is because the session manager runs with the JDBC "autocommit on" parameter, and some XA data sources don't support the use of "autocommit on." Additionally, the update of the session database is not transactional, nor will the session database participate in transactions with other resources, so there is no need for using an XA data source with the session manager.

The default maximum pool size of 10 is a good starting point when sizing the connection pool for database persistence. Unless the session object is quite large or your site is handling thousands of concurrent users, it's unlikely that the pool will need to be much larger. In most cases, the default maximum will suffice, or perhaps a moderate increase (to 22–30) may be required. Recall that a connection pool is created for each application server instance, so three or four application servers result in three to four times that many total connection objects that are accessing the database.

Depending on the size of the session object, you may find it beneficial to use one of the other options available on this dialog. We'll discuss determining the size of the session object later in this chapter, but for large session objects, meaning those greater than 4KB in size, the options available can be used to improve performance.

When DB2 is used as the database, the page size can be adjusted from the default of 4KB to 8KB, 16KB, and 32KB. This allows the varchar database column used for the session object to fit onto a single database page. The result is faster performance for session objects that are approximately 7KB, 15KB, and 31KB in size.

The multi-row schema option can be employed to improve performance in some cases for large session objects, regardless of the database in use. With multi-row sessions, each attribute in the session object is stored in its own row in the database, instead of the default of storing all attributes in one column in a single row. This can be used to improve performance in two ways. The first is for non-DB2 databases, where WAS makes no provision to adjust the table page size. If each attribute stored in session is smaller than the page or block size for the database, specifying multi-row allows each row to be contained in a single database block. This can be combined with the optional write setting "only updated attributes" so that only the rows corresponding to each updated attribute are written to, instead of a write to all rows.

The other advantage to using multi-row sessions is that they allow you to have a session object larger than 2MB in size. Such extremely large session objects are most definitely not recommended from a performance and failover perspective, but WAS does provide a mechanism for dealing with objects of this size.

Memory-to-Memory Replication

As implied by the name, memory-to-memory replication stores a copy of the session object in the memory of one or more application server processes. In this mode, the WAS Distributed Replication Service (DRS) is used to replicate session information among application servers. Since DRS is used by multiple WAS runtime components, there's a discussion of the DRS architecture and configuration options in Chapter 20, "WAS Network Deployment Architecture," including instructions that walk through configuring DRS as a failover mechanism for HTTP session. As a result, if you plan to use DRS/Internal Messaging for an HTTP session failover, you should refer to that chapter. In order not to duplicate content, all we'll provide here is a brief review of the components in DRS and their role in HTTP session management:

  • Replicator—The data transfer component of DRS running in an application server.

  • Replication domain—The set of replicators that are connected together to share data.

  • Session manager—The web container component that manages HTTP session objects.

  • Replication mode—A server is a "client" if it only forwards changes to other session managers, while it is considered a "server" if it only receives changes from other session managers, and "both" (or peer to peer) if it does both.

  • Group—A session object is assigned to a group; by default, all session managers listen to all groups, but you can partition where a session object is replicated to.

  • Single replica—An alternative to groups in which, as the name implies, the session object is only replicated once.

There are four configuration options for memory to memory replication:

  • Peer-to-peer, where each application server has a "replicator" process and stores a copy of the session object for all other application servers in the domain.

  • Peer-to-peer with standalone replicators, where each application server stores a copy of the session object for all other application servers in the domain, but additional dedicated application servers run the replicator process.

  • Client-server, where the application servers running the application have just a local copy of the session object for requests to that application server, and dedicated application servers store session copies and run the replicator process.

  • Client-server with dedicated replicators and dedicated stores, where each application server maintains just the session object for requests to that application server, with application servers running the replicator process and additional application servers storing copies of the session objects for the replication domain.

Memory-to-memory replication provides failover in much the same manner as with database persistence. When a request arrives at an application server and the session object is not in the local cache, the session manager component of the runtime will attempt to retrieve it from the local or remote replica.

In order to configure the session manager to use memory-to-memory replication, a replication domain must be defined. This is somewhat analogous to creating a database when database persistence is to be employed and must be performed prior to specifying "Memory to Memory Replication" in the Distributed Session dialog shown in Figure 22-8.

Once you specify memory to memory as the mechanism for distributing sessions, the steps for configuring and tuning DRS are the same as those described in Chapter 20.

Before leaving the topic of distribution mechanisms, let's give some consideration to what might lead you to choose one option over the other. Performance will not be a factor since 95% of the cost of replicating session is serialization/deserialization of the session object, which must occur regardless of how the session is distributed (memory to memory or database). Additionally, as the size of the session object increases, performance degrades, again about equally for both session distribution options. Instead, the decision will be based partially on how the two technologies differ:

  • With a database, you actually persist the data (to disk), so a highly available database server can survive a cascading failure, while using application servers as session stores and replicators for this purpose may not.

  • In the case of a "gold standard" (two identical cells/domains), a highly available database can pretty much assure session failover between domains, while with memory to memory, there can only be a single replicator common to the two cells; hence, it becomes a single point of failure (SPOF).

Thus, for configurations where cross-cell session failover is a requirement, a highly available database is the only option for eliminating a SPOF. Note that while sharing sessions across cells is supported, this is not generally recommended. By sharing state between cells, it makes it significantly more difficult to independently upgrade components (application and WAS) in the two cells.

In the end, the decision then becomes based on what technology you are most comfortable with and which delivers the required quality of service for your availability requirements.

Custom Tuning Parameters for HTTP Session

The Custom Tuning Options dialog controls the frequency and type of updates that the session manager makes to either the database or to memory-to-memory replicas. This dialog is reached by selecting Custom Tuning Parameters on the bottom of the Distributed Environment Settings dialog (Figure 22-8) and is depicted in Figure 22-11. In prior versions of WebSphere Application Server, the default was to update the session object at the end of the Servlet service method, and while this remains an option in V5 ("medium tuning" in the Tuning dialog), the default in WAS V5 is for a time-based write of the session updates. As of V5.02 (and above), the default time interval is every 10 seconds; earlier WAS V5 releases defaulted to 120 seconds.

While time-based writes offer better performance than writing at the end of the Servlet service method, they also introduce the possibility of inconsistent application state. By deferring updates to the end of the specified time interval, an application could appear to move "backward" in state in the event of an application server failure during the specified update interval. Session changes made between updates will be lost while the end user will continue to use the web site. It is possible that the application's session state could move backward in time while the web page being viewed does not reflect this, potentially resulting in problems. Tests by the WebSphere performance lab have shown that a 10-second interval provides essentially all of the performance benefit of longer intervals, while limiting the vulnerability of inconsistent session state.

While requiring more resources (CPU, I/O), the update of the session object at the end of each Servlet service method ensures data consistency in the event of the failover of requests from one application server to another.

Figure 22.11Figure 22-11 Session Write Frequency Tuning dialog.

In order to avoid possible application state inconsistencies, the authors favor the Medium tuning setting shown in Figure 22-11 since it minimizes the cost of writing updates by only writing the session attributes that have been updated.

You can further refine the tuning levels depicted by selecting Custom Settings, which invokes the dialog shown in Figure 22-12.

Figure 22.12Figure 22-12 Session Tuning Custom Settings.

The primary options of interest here are the ability to specify a manual update, though this requires that the application code use the IBMSession class, which is an extension to the HTTP session API, for managing sessions. With a manual update, the session manager only writes the session data and last access time to the session replica when the application invokes the sync() method in the IBMSession class. The session data that is written out to the replica is controlled by the write contents option selected. If the Servlet or JSP terminates without invoking the sync() method, the session manager saves the contents of the session object into the session cache (if caching is enabled) but does not update the modified session data in the session replica. The session manager will only update the last access time in the replica asynchronously at a later time. While this option requires using a non-J2EE extension and, as a result, is not portable to other application servers, it does provide the most control over writing updates of the session object. Use of this option is most beneficial for applications that only read or update the session object rarely. If changes in the session object don't occur on every browser interaction, the manual update will likely outperform the use of end-of-service method updates.

The other setting of interest is the ability to schedule session cleanup at certain times of day instead of when the session times out. While in some cases, such as where sessions are extremely long-lived, this option might be of value, however it's best to remove unneeded sessions as soon as they are no longer needed in order to minimize the impact of managing and tracking the sessions that are no longer needed.

Session Tuning and Troubleshooting

Session Object Size

As noted previously, the information contained in HTTP session is stored in the application server JVM, which is a limited resource that is shared by all applications and users. As a result, the more information that is stored in session, the greater the memory footprint for HTTP session, with a proportional decrease in JVM memory available for creation and execution of application objects. In turn, performance can degrade as the decreased heap memory leads to frequent garbage collection (GC). Another factor is the amount of time it takes to serialize and deserialize HTTP session as it is being written to a remote copy—the authors know of cases where the write of the updated session objects from the application server to the database server could not complete due to the size of the session object as the application server was failing, thus negating any failover. Keeping these factors in mind, as well as the primary purpose of HTTP session, which is simply to maintain state between browser invocations, you should strive to keep session objects small so that HTTP session serves as a bookmark and not as a library. How small, you ask? Ideally, the session object should be less than 4KB in size, which coincidentally is also the size limit for a cookie. Of course, it's not always possible to architect an "ideal application," so with this in mind, you should strive to maintain an upper size limit in the 30–60KB in range. In this range, there will be performance degradation, but it will not be as severe as with much larger sessions.

With the size of the session object serving as a primary contributor to application performance, it's fortunate that WAS V5 provides a mechanism for determining session size via the WAS Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI). By configuring the maximum monitoring level in the Tivoli Performance Viewer, as shown in Figure 22-13, you can monitor the size of the session object, as shown in Figure 22-14. The size is shown in bytes. Those of you not familiar with PMI and the Tivoli Performance Viewer will want to see Chapter 25, "Performance Tuning Tools," for a more comprehensive discussion of these two subjects.

Figure 22.13Figure 22-13 Session Manager PMI Monitoring Level Settings.

Figure 22.14Figure 22-14 Session object size in the Tivoli Performance Viewer.



Non-Serializable Objects in Session

Another common issue deals with the application placing an object in HTTP session that's not serializable. This typically shows up in an application server SystemErr file, as shown in Code Snippet 22-1.

Code Snippet 22-1 Session exception example from logs

[3/17/02 10:16:44:253 PST] 61602dc6 SessionContex X SESN0058E:
BackedHashtableMR: a problem occurred inserting a new session into
the database. If a SQLException has occurred then refer to the
appropriate database documentation for your environment. Also, assure
that you have properly configured a datasource for Session Manager.

In most cases, you can turn on session trace to determine the non-serializable session object, but in some cases such as Code Snippet 22-2, this still is not definitive (you can see that the "non-serializable stanza" is empty).

Code Snippet 22-2 Non-serializable stanza from logs

[3/17/03 10:16:55:940 PST] 61602dc6 SessionContex > SessionContext:getIHttpSession - leaving 
and returning session of Session Object Internals: id : LE0W4B1E0SPCR2TT4AI1BZA <omitted for brevity> non-serializable app specific session data : {} serializable app specific session data : {webControler=com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.petstore.control.web.
ShoppingClientControllerWebImpl@69246dcc, currentScreen=MAIN, profilemgr=com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.petstore.control.web.
ProfileMgrWebImpl@1e272dcc, customer=com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.petstore.control.web.CustomerWebImpl@
2d572dcc, cart=com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.petstore.control.web.ShoppingCartWebImpl@
33292dcc, mm=com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.petstore.control.web.ModelManager@20bbedcc,
language=en_US}

This is because the object implements serializable but isn't actually serializable.

Code Snippet 22-3 contains the source code for a JSP, SessionObjects.jsp, which iterates through all the attributes in the session object, actually tries to write/read all the objects out as a "true" test of serialization, and then displays the results, as shown in Figure 22-15. The JSP displays, left to right:

  • The attribute name

  • The attribute value

  • The results of reading the object after serialization/deserialization

Any attribute that displays "read object null" is in fact not serializable and should not be placed into session if you intend to use distributed sessions.

You simply can drop the JSP into the installedApps directory for the application, <wasinstallroot/installedApps\installedapp.ear\installed app.war, along with the rest of the JSPs. Next, create a session object in the application though normal application flow and then invoke the JSP by invoking the appropriate URL: <webapp URL>/SessionObjects.jsp. This will show the offending object(s). You'll also note that this shows the size of each session attribute, so this can be helpful in determining if multi-row sessions would be of value. Please note that the JSP uses a large amount of Java scriptlet and, as a result, is not necessarily representative of "application best practices." Instead, it was developed rather quickly as a debugging aid.

Figure 22.15Figure 22-15 Session Object JSP.





Code Snippet 22-3 Session Object List JSP

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<%@ page 
language="java"
contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"
%>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<META name="GENERATOR" content="IBM WebSphere Studio">
<TITLE>SessionObjects.jsp</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<H1>Session Object List JSP</H1>

This JSP will dump information about the current HTTPSession.<br><br>

<%@ page import="java.io.*,java.util.*,javax.servlet.*" session="false" %>
<%! public void dumpSession(HttpServletRequest request, JspWriter out)
throws IOException { HttpSession session = request.getSession(false); Object ro = null ; out.println("Session ID from session.getID : " + session.getId() + "<br>"); out.println("Session ID from getHeader: " + request.getHeader("Cookie") + "<br>"); Enumeration enum = session.getAttributeNames(); if ( enum.hasMoreElements() ) { int totalSize = 0; out.println("<h3>Session Objects:</h3>"); out.println("<TABLE Border=\"2\" WIDTH=\"65%\" BGCOLOR=\
"#DDDDFF\">"); out.println("<tr><td>Name</td><td>Object.toString()</td>"); out.println("<td>Raw Bytes</td><td>Size (bytes)</td></tr>"); while ( enum.hasMoreElements() ) { String name = (String)enum.nextElement(); Object sesobj = session.getAttribute(name) ; ObjectOutputStream oos = null; ByteArrayOutputStream bstream = new
ByteArrayOutputStream(); try { oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bstream); oos.writeObject(sesobj); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (oos != null) { try {oos.flush();} catch (IOException ioe) {} try {oos.close();} catch (IOException ioe) {} } } ObjectInputStream ois = null; ro = null ; try { ois = new ObjectInputStream(new
ByteArrayInputStream(bstream.toByteArray())); ro = ois.readObject(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (ois != null) { try {ois.close();} catch (IOException ioe) {} } } totalSize += bstream.size(); out.println("<tr><td>" + name + "</td><td>" +
session.getAttribute(name) + "</td><td>" + ro + "</td>"); out.println("<td>" + bstream.size() + " bytes </td></tr>"); } out.println("</table><BR>"); out.println("Total Bytes: " + totalSize + "<br><br>"); } else { out.println("No objects in session"); } } %> <% response.setHeader("Pragma", "No-cache"); response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache"); response.setDateHeader("Expires",0); HttpSession session = request.getSession(false); if (session == null) { out.println("No session"); } else { dumpSession(request, out); } %> </BODY>

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This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020