> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey W. Baker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, May 08, 2000 9:19 PM
> To: Leslie Mikesell
> Cc: Jeffrey W. Baker; Greg Stark; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: speed up/load balancing of session-based sites
>
>
> On Mon, 8 May 2000, Leslie Mikesell wrote:
>
> > According to Jeffrey W. Baker:
> >
> > > > I keep meaning to write this up as an Apache:: module,
> but it's pretty trivial
> > > > to cons up an application-specific version. The only
> thing this doesn't
> > > > provide is a way to deal with large data structures.
> But generally if the
> > > > application is big enough to need such data structures
> you have a real
> > > > database from which you can reconstruct the data on
> each request, just store
> > > > the state information in the cookie.
> > >
> > > Your post does a significant amount of hand waving
> regarding people's
> > > requirements for their websites. I try to keep an open
> mind when giving
> > > advice and realize that people all have different needs.
> That's why I
> > > prefixed my advice with "On my sites..."
> >
> > Can anyone quantify this a bit?
> >
> > > On my sites, I use the session as a general purpose data
> sink. I find
> > > that I can significantly improve user experience by
> keeping things in the
> > > session related to the user-site interaction. These
> session object
> > > contain way more information than could be stuffed into a
> cookie, even if
> > > I assumed that all of my users had cookies turned on.
> Note also that
> > > sending a large cookie can significantly increase the size of the
> > > request. That's bad for modem users.
> > >
> > > Your site may be different. In fact, it had better be! :)
> >
> > Have you timed your session object retrieval and the cleanup code
> > that becomes necessary with server-session data compared to
> > letting the client send back (via cookies or URL) everything you
> > need to reconstruct the necessary state without keeping temporary
> > session variables on the server? There must be some size where
> > the data values are as easy to pass as the session key, and some
> > size where it becomes slower and more cumbersome. Has anyone
> > pinned down the size where a server-side lookup starts to win?
jwb wrote:
> I have really extensive benchmarks for every part of
> Apache::Session. These will be released with version 1.5,
> which also includes more than fifty new unit tests.
Cool. Strict benchmarking and testing is severely lacking in general
in Perl modules.
Apache::Session rocks, however the name doesn't describe the functionality
of the module (it has nothing to do with Apache). Are there any plans
to change it to "Persistent::Session" or some other name? I'm sure
people are overlooking it because of this.
Leon
--
Leon Brocard | perl "programmer" | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
