Sitecore Analytics Robots SessionTimeout causing a premature session timeout

Question

In one of our projects, we ran into random session timeout problems. With a recent discovery, I noticed that Sitecore Analytics.Robots.SessionTimeout may be what triggers it.

We notice that with a random session timeout, the timeout value was set to 1 min instead of our 120 min.

After viewing all the configuration files, we will notice that only one configuration has a timeout set to 1 min.

We think that increasing the timeout of the analytics-robots session to 120 minutes will fix our random timeout problem, but my question is: will it have any negative impact on performance or security problem, allowing the robot sessions to live for 120 minutes instead of 1 min?

Thanks for your suggestions.

Answer 1

I registered a problem with Sitecore and here is their answer to this problem.

I do not think that the behavior should be considered an error because Sitecore CMS was designed for use with ASP.NET WebForms technology. When using web forms, bot detection depends on the control in the page. Naturally, you cannot use it in an ASP.NET MVC application, but there is a simple solution - put the following code inside the element:

<% if (Context.Diagnostics.Tracing || Context.Diagnostics.Profiling) { Response.Write("<!-- Visitor identification is disabled because debugging is active. -->"); } else if (Tracker.IsActive && (Tracker.Visitor.VisitorClassification == 925)) { Response.Write("<link href=\"/layouts/System/VisitorIdentification.aspx\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />"); } %> 

Answer 2

For me, this seems like another problem ... I do not think the problem is that the robots are configured for 1 minute of the session. You say that the problem is "random", but is it possible that it really happens that some site visitors are incorrectly identified as robots?

I don’t think that you will see the effect of performance by changing the wait time of the robot, but this will relate to the symptom, and not to finding the true cause.