But the revokation list is always going to be orders of magnitude smaller than the list of active sessions.

that may be, but who cares how big or small it is really

if you are facebook sized, with 1b+ active sessions versus an alternative with 10m+ revocations... the kind of applications that reach this scale, they have enormous amounts of state anyway.

	▲	littlecranky67 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everybody thinks Mag7 scale, but actually it is more relevant if you are a tiny webservice - but available world wide. If you need to match each and every http request from a user half way around the world against a central db, you can't beat the speed of light. If you can do authentication on each downstream server directly using crypto and JWT validation, you at least save that roundtrip to the session db. The revocation list is tiny (a few megabytes tops), append-only, can be public to the world, and thus easy to replicate to your downstream nodes. If you are a smaller gig, you won't have to bother with replicating your sessions and keeping them in sync globally.