Heath Stewart wrote: Exciting! I've been through tornados having been from the midwest, but this is a new experience. I had a lot of interest in volcanoes (and earthquakes) when I was younger (did a fair share more than just "class projects" on them) so this will be fun to see in person. If I get a chance I'll be taking some pics. Awsome! :-D I'm so jealous! I've had that same, call it morbid, curiosity about how these things work and still have it to this day. I've been within 500 feet of a tornado before, BUT COULDN'T SEE IT! because it was heavily rain-wrapped. All we saw, looking through the 8 foot tall plate glass windows in the front of the store ;P, were roofs being torn off buildings ... what a let-down that was. I've even had the pleasure of watching empty Coke cans slide back and forth acrossed my desk during earthquakes in and around South-East Michigan. I know, it's not an earthquake mecca and they're weak by Pacific Coast standards, but it's still pretty funny to try and balance on one foot while putting jeans on during an earthquake (1986 - epicenter in middle of Lake Erie). If Mt St Helens blows again, we want pictures! LOTS of pictures! Setup a webcam if you have to! Who knows if the one at the Johnston Ridge Observatory[^] will be working if/when it does decide to erupt. and now, back to our show... --------8<-------------------------- I agree with your assessment of the speed of persisting Session info to an SQL server. It's as flexible a solution as your going to get, but it does tend to be a little slow. I've installed the SQL state server package that comes with, I can't remember which or where, but I think, ASP.NET or Visual Studio .NET Enterprise. I've thought about both single and multiple server session state caching schemes. A single server solution is easy to implement, but has the downfall of not being scalable to support say, 15 IIS servers. Mostly, I've wondered what the benefits, limitations and pitfalls are of a solution consisting of small cluster of servers, no more than 3 to start, each running a "Singleton" component, but sync'ing up their data on a real-time basis. These servers could possibly run behind a single-IP solution to facilitate fault-tolerance. The list of ponderings I've come up with is pretty long... What would be the database s