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Can't pass mysqli connection in session in php
Many of us have written PHP applications that require databases; mostly MySQL, but I have often used very small MS Access databases for people less technically capable so they can download an tweak them/save backups/etc. on their own (whether this is correct or not, I have no idea).
What I notice, is a lot of time is spent connecting and running some of the same queries. Because of this I had an interesting thought: Storing the connection and possible result sets that are mostly static in a $_SESSION variable to reduce the burden as the user navigates the site.
Obviously doing so requires a lot of consideration. Things like closing the connection when the session is destroyed is just the start.
My question boils down to: Is this really something possible? And if so, what things should I be aware of (besides session fixation, as it is its own problem that applies to all sessions)?
Even if you could do this (resource vs. data), this is a bad idea. You’ll wind up with lots of concurrent open connections, which will blow your max connections very quickly… especially if its lifecycle is expanded beyond sub 100ms (depending on your queries) to 20 minutes or more. With open connections, something like MySQL also won’t be able to reset its memory allocations properly, and the whole system sort of goes to hell. In short, this is not what DBs are for unless the only consumer of your code will be a single user.
As an alternative, I’d highly recommend caching technologies which are designed specifically to reduce database load and obviate connection times. Using something like, at its simplest, memcached will dramatically improve performance all the way around, and you’ll be able to specify exactly how many system resources go into the cache — while letting the database do its job of getting data when it needs to.