CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
Chris Camaratta
Chris Camaratta

Reputation: 2769

Does PHP support "Application Sessions"?

I've got a PHP app that stores arbitrary config info in a file. I would like to read that file once, when the app first starts, save it as some kind of application state variable, and leverage it across potentially thousands of user sessions. My Google foo is usually pretty good but in this case the only thing I'm able to come up with is the $_SESSION variable. Using it means reading the config file once per user session, which could mean reading it thousands of times a minute in high-volume installations, which seems inefficient.

When I worked with .NET web apps there was an idea of an application session that could be used to persist app configuration information across multiple user sessions. Does PHP have a similar concept?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 55

Answers (1)

symcbean
symcbean

Reputation: 48357

Does php provide an API for cross-session data management? No

Does php provide a mechanism for reading and updating data? Yes there's lots of them

While this sounds like a session handler which is shared across multiple users, it's implementation is very different. By default (and by necessity) php's sessions are blocking. If the access to this shared dataset was blocking then you would severely limit concurrency.

Given that the access to the data must be non-blocking, how do you mediate concurrent updates to the shared data? A lot depends on the frequency of the updates. But there's also questions about capacity and whether you need to support multiple nodes.

Any one-size-all solution for the functionality is going to be severely hampered in capacity and/or performance. There are lots of products PHP will integrate with to provide a suitable storage substrate, however (leaving aside the logic of the interface for your super-session) it is not in the nature of open source software to package up third party products and hide them behind APIs.

Upvotes: 2

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