Streamlit session states in users simultaneous activity

Hello Streamliters :slight_smile:

Iā€™ve found strange behaviours with st.session_state. What happened to me was that it seems like when two users are using the web app at the same time, saved session states from one user activity interfere with the other user activity. Is it normal? And how should this be avoided?

Hi @PaleAlex, this shouldnā€™t happen, since each user should have their own session. Could you share a simple reproducible example where you think this might be happening?

Hello @blackary

thanks for your answer. I am attaching a screenshot.

Short story of the app and of my use of session states
I am sorry the app itā€™s not in English but I will try to explain it in short.
The app suggests the best restaurant in any italian city the user is looking for. I wanted the suggestion to change only when the user changes both city and province and for this I create a session state (city, province) in order to save the first state and check when it changes.

Coming to the point
I am opening two different chrome tabs (from the same PC) and I am running the streamlit app in both.

  1. Right side tab. Looking for city = Pesaro, province = PU. Here it is saved the session state (Pesaro, PU)
  2. Left side tab. Looking for city = Ferrara, province = FE. Here it is saved the session state (Ferrara, FE)

So far so good. Now what is unexpected:

  1. Left side I am changing the city from Ferrara to Livorno. The suggestion changes right away, going to Pesaro (the city saved in the session state of the right side tab), but expecting, firstly, not to change, or in case to change with Livornoā€¦

In any case, I think at the end I am going to change the code using a form component instead of session states.

Hope I was clear,
Alex

Hi @PaleAlex, I spoke with a few others internally, and consensus was that we all agree this shouldnā€™t happen ā€“ each browser tab should have a separate session state.

We also werenā€™t able to reproduce this with a simplified app. For example, I tried opening this app in two separate tabs, and going back and forth, and wasnā€™t able to find a case where the state of one seemed to influence the other

import streamlit as st

st.selectbox("Choose name", options=["Name1", "Name2", "Name3"], key="name")

st.write(st.session_state)

st.button("Rerun")

Could you try to whittle your code down to the bare minimum that still shows the issue, and then share that simplified code?

Hello @blackary.

Here below a snippet of the code. I first take the inputs and save them in session states. Then I check for them and if they have been changed I update them.

city = st.text_input('CittĆ ', placeholder="e.g. Ferrara", key = "field").capitalize()
province = st.text_input('Provincia (sigla)', placeholder="e.g. FE", max_chars=2).upper()
state = "Italia" #st.text_input('Stato', placeholder="e.g. Italia").capitalize()
border = st.selectbox("Confine di ricerca", ("comune", "provincia"))
if "border" not in st.session_state:
    st.session_state["border"] = border
if "geo" not in st.session_state:
    st.session_state["geo"] = (city, province)

#doing things not related with session states

if border != st.session_state["border"] or (city != st.session_state["geo"][0] and province != st.session_state["geo"][1]):
   #doing other things not related... and finally update session states
    st.session_state["border"] = border
    st.session_state["geo"] = (city, province)

Here is the entire Python script where I use session states

The web app is active at choosing.club. Eventually you can try from there, opening two tabs of Chrome, logging in with a pseudo mail (mail@mail.com), and repeating my experiment I reported in:

Hi @PaleAlex, I wonder if some of the complexity is happening in the ā€œdoing other things unrelatedā€ code. Itā€™s difficult to say for sure. But, one very simple test is to add a line to your script that does st.write(st.session_state), and see if the session state of one tab affects the session state of the other. I tried using your simple example, and didnā€™t find any case where the session state of one affected the session state of the other, but it could at least provide more visibility into what exactly is happening.

Sweet domain, by the way!

3 Likes

Hi @blackary,

thank you for your answer. Itā€™s really strange. I will surely try to figure it out writing down session states. I also noticed that I was not able to reproduce the issue with two tabs of different browsers (edge and chrome).

For now, thank you for assisting me. Will let you know if I find something.

1 Like

Hello Streamliters :slight_smile:

I have a same problem.
In my app, different user share their session state.

  • especially, when using folium, if one person move to Sanfrancisco, other users move to same location.

Unfortunately, I cannot find reproducible simplified code.
But, Iā€™d like to check if sentences below are correct.

  • When using cloud environment, whether session state is shared depends on how the cloud environment stores sessions.
  • So, some environments session_state can be shared between users.

Thank you!

Debug info

  • Streamlit version: 1.16
    • streamlit-folium : 0.8.1
  • Python version: 3.9
  • Using Conda
  • OS version: Ubuntu 18.04 ( Docker container )
  • Browser version: Chrome 109.0.5414.7

No, session_state is is never shared. But you can store shared state in session_state. Maybe you are unintentionally doing that.

Hi @Goyo !

Thank you for your answer.
I found the post ( Eliminate states of modules to avoid the accidental state sharing across users' sessions ) about shared state.
I still cannot understand how streamlit have shared stateā€¦
Could you give me some documents or other information ?

Thank you.

Not sure what you are after. Yes, module-level state is shared. The cache generated by cache_data and cache_resource is shared. External resources are shared too. There are many ways to have shared state.

Hi @Goyo !

Thank you for your help.
Iā€™ll check my code :smiley: ( As you say, unintentionally shared state was stored in session_state. )

Have a good day !