Sancar Saran wrote:
Hello
On Tuesday 12 February 2008 13:39:19 Stut wrote:
I'll be using memcache as a simple cache. I hate sessions and avoid them
for anything but the most trivial sites. The main sites I work with no
longer use sessions because they add a pointless layer of complexity to
any application that need to scale beyond a single machine. Maybe I'm
just lucky that the applications I develop don't need to store huge
amounts of temporary data during a visit, but I'm yet to come across a
reason to use "session data".
-Stut
May I ask how can you record the state ?
You may.
Oh, you probably want an actual answer... ok.
The only 'state' I really need to keep track of is a few details about
the logged in user (ID, username, etc). These get encrypted and get
passed around as a single value in the same way PHP manages the session
ID (cookie or embedded in the URL).
The encrypted value is time limited and gets updated on each request.
Clearly there is a limit to how much info can be stored like this but
after some analysis of how the site worked I reached the conclusion that
most of the crap that was being put into the session was not required
from request to request and could be retrieved from the DB when it was
needed.
This has been running on a site with > 1 million unique users a month
for over 6 months with no issues. I now use this system with most sites
I get involved in and am yet to find a valid reason to replace it with a
traditional session.
Part of the reason this works is that in the few parts of the site where
it would make sense to use a traditional session to temporarily store
data it does it in a table in the database. This is essentially a
SQL-based session but with one important difference... DB hits are
limited when they are needed only - i.e. when the user is using those
parts of the site. With a SQL-based session you cause 2+ DB hits for
each request even if you don't actually use the session. This is bad m'kay!
Over the past few years I've learnt a lot about scalability and the
single biggest tip I can pass on is to only do what is absolutely
necessary at any given time. Sessions are the biggest barrier to being
able to do that, so they had to go.
Hope that answers your question.
-Stut
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http://stut.net/
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