I am wondering which is more efficient, to store temporary data (related to that session) in a session using the $_SESSION variable in PHP or store and retrieve from an SQL database?
Thank you for your time.
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I am wondering which is more efficient, to store temporary data (related to that session) in a session using the $_SESSION variable in PHP or store and retrieve from an SQL database?
Thank you for your time.
Keep in mind the session variable is backed by a storage mechanism, that is, when the request finishes the session gets written by the session handler, by default this is to a file. On the next request it is pulled back from that file (or whatever else the session handler uses).
If you’re reading and writing this data on every request, just stick with a the $_SESSION variables, the overhead of connecting, querying and updating a database will not be faster than the default $_SESSION.
You’ll probably only ever want to use a database backed session if you are running multiple load-balanced servers and need to share the session data between them. In this case, if you find the overhead of the database sessions to be slowing down your site to a noticeable degree you might consider sticking memcached between your web server and the database.