I'm studying for a MS certification and one of the practice tests I'm doing has a question where the point of contention is the performance between storing the session in SQL Server as opposed to StateServer.
Given the app is running in a web farm, which solution for session state gives the best performance (SQL Server or StateServer) and most importantly, why?
State Server is faster because it stores session data in an in-memory dictionary. SQL Server is slower because it's stored in a database which persists data to disk.
SQL server is also slower because everything is stored in one table which leads to contention as more and more clients access/update the session data.
SQL server is more reliable because it is persisted to disk and can be set up as a cluster with failover capability.
See the preamble in this article for an indepth explanation.