[SOLVED] Memory used by session variables

[incubus]

Hi all - newbie here.

I have an HTML form and am storing the values the user enters in session variables so they can persist between pages (the form is over 3 html pages). All in all, there will be around 45 values stored like so:

 

$myVar = $_POST['myVar'];
$_SESSION(myVar) = $myVar;

 

Will this have a detrimental effect on performance? How much memory is available to the session to store variables? Would it make a difference if there were lots of users doing the same thing?

 

Would I be better putting all the form values into a large array, and then just storing the array in the session? That is:

 

$myArray = array();
$myArray[0] = $_POST['myVar'];

$_SESSION(myArray) = $myArray;

 

Hope this makes sense, thanks for looking.

[incubus]

Anyone any clues about this? Thanks.

[trq]

Session values are stored on disk, not in memory. generally speaking you need'nt worry about such things too much.

[MadTechie]

if you wanted to you could recompiling PHP using the shared memory module for sessions, or use a RAM Disk. Enable this with "configure -–with-mm" then re-compile PHP, and set session.save_handler=mm in php.ini.

[incubus]

Session values are stored on disk, not in memory. generally speaking you need'nt worry about such things too much.

 

Great, thanks.

 

Just from a best practise point of view, would it make a difference if the variables were stored in an array which was then itself stored in the session?

[trq]

would it make a difference

 

It would, but once again, I think the difference would be that minimal that its not worth worrying about.

[incubus]

Thanks all. Hope to be able to help some of you out in the future.