Actually, it only lives during the session. It exists on behalf of a single client. Once the client terminates, the session Bean terminates. In case of an EJB server crash, all session Beans are destroyed. Clients must then reestablish new session Beans.
Entity Beans are the counterpart to session Beans.
They last typically longer than session Beans. They represent some data in the database so even when the EJB server crashes, the entity beans continue to exist. We'll talk more about entity Beans after we complete the basic EJB architecture. Tune Performance Across Your Entire Distributed Application with NuMega DevPartner 2.0 Java Edition. DevPartner Java Edition helps you find problems with memory use, multi-threading, code performance and test coverage.