If session pickup is disabled

If you leave session pickup disabled, the cluster does not keep track of sessions and after a failover, active sessions have to be restarted or resumed. Most session can be resumed as a normal result of how TCP/IP communications resumes communication after any routine network interruption.

The session-pickup setting does not affect session failover for sessions terminated by the cluster.

If you do not require session failover protection, leaving session pickup disabled may reduce CPU usage and reduce HA heartbeat network bandwidth usage. Also if your cluster is mainly being used for traffic that is not synchronized (for example, for proxy-based security profile processing) enabling session pickup is not recommended since most sessions will not be failed over anyway.

If session pickup is not enabled, the FGCP does not synchronize the primary unit session table to other cluster units and sessions do not resume after a failover. After a device or link failover all sessions are briefly interrupted and must be re-established at the application level after the cluster renegotiates.

Many protocols can successfully restart sessions with little, if any, loss of data. For example, after a failover, users browsing the web can just refresh their browsers to resume browsing. Since most HTTP sessions are very short, in most cases they will not even notice an interruption unless they are downloading large files. Users downloading a large file may have to restart their download after a failover.

Other protocols may experience data loss and some protocols may require sessions to be manually restarted. For example, a user downloading files with FTP may have to either restart downloads or restart their FTP client.