Don't forget that you can use the DB to store PHP Sessions as well, which is faster than storing the sessions in /tmp on the file system. If you have well written SQL, you can have 5-30 queries per page, most of which should return the data in under 1/100 of a second. I was running a site doing 150 queries per second, serving 1M page views a day. That's about 13M DB queries per day at a rate of about 11-12 page views per second. All on a dual 800mhz and 1gb of memory on FreeBSD, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It can be done! Peter On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Dave Smith wrote: > Chris, > > I'm assuming you're running this thing on *nix. > > Session variables are stored on the file system. PHP writes them out to > /tmp, where it subsequently reads them upon request. The question is: > How good at caching is your DB? If it can cache common select queries, > then you are probably better using the DB (since file system caching is > usually not that great). If your DB is busy with other things while the > file system is relatively idle, maybe it'd be better to store them in > sessions. > > The only real way to know is to benchmark both methods. You could come > up with some real quick code that implements both methods. Then, run > ApacheBench (ab) or JMeter to test the performance. Be sure that you run > the benchmark utility in such a way to use the session vars (ie, > simulate a user login). During the tests, watch things like load average > (top) and I/O activity (iostat). > > Let us know which method works best for you. Scalability issues are so cool. > > --Dave > > Chris Payne wrote: > > Hi there everyone, > > > > I have a system I am programming, and each page needs to get various config > > elements from a DB, of course this means lots of DB access for each page. > > What I was wondering is, after the user has logged in successfully it > > currently stores their email, name, address and a few other bits of data in > > a session, would it also be a good idea to store other information in a > > session at the very start when they login to ease DB access? Are there > > problems with having lots of data in a session? Well when I say lots of > > data, I mean things like font size, color, table images, background colors, > > some normal text etc .... nothing like an essay or anything, just about > > 30-50 different variables. > > > > Just want to make sure it won't slow my system down by doing this, or would > > it speed it up because of less DB access? > > > > Thanks for your help > > > > Regards > > > > Chris > > > > > > > > > -- > PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@purplecow.com http://www.purplecow.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
