Question

i’m working on a website for my uni work, and it has to allow login access for different users. My tutor has told me I should be using a session variable/array to store all the users data such as first name, address etc.

In my design I just have the userID and Email address (email is used to login) and then functions to get the data from the database as required. He says this would slow the site down as am doing alot of connections to the database.

Should I store all the data in session variables or connect to the database to access this data?

Thanks for any advice :).

Answer 1

You could get the information from the database when they first log in, and then keep it in session variables until they log out or the session times out. Keeping lots of user data in session variables could create some overhead if there are many users logged in at the same time, but it will be different from making constant queries.

The best way to answer might be to ask how much other data exists for users and how much of it is likely to be needed in a “typical” session. The data that most users will require to be loaded at some point during a session could be loaded at login. Data that most users do not need during a typical session could be loaded on demand.