[[_transient-session]]

=== Transient sessions

{project_name} has concept of transient sessions. When transient sessions are used, there is no real user session created after successful authentication.
Only a temporary transient session is created for the scope of the current request that successfully authenticated the user. This transient session allows {project_name}
to run <<_protocol-mappers, protocol mappers>> after the authentication.

When transient sessions are used, the client application has no way to refresh or introspect the token or check if a specific session is valid.
In some situations, these actions are not needed, so you can avoid the additional overhead for persistence of user sessions.
This would mean the save of performance, memory and network communication (in case of cluster and cross-datacenter environments).
