What does the term sticky session mean in a web-farm scenario? Why would you use a sticky session? What is the potential disadvantage of using a sticky session?

Sticky session refers to the feature of many commercial load balancing solutions for web-farms to route the requests for a particular session to the same physical machine that serviced the first request for that session. This is mainly used to ensure that a in-proc session is not lost as a result of requests for a session being routed to different servers. Since requests for a user are always routed to the same machine that first served the request for that session, sticky sessions can cause uneven load distribution across servers.