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Thanks for the great help in clearing that up for me Shogun. I'll play around with it to see how well I can get it to work with my system. Thanks again to everyone else for the helpful tips and suggestions.

Thanks for the help guys. Even the simple tips can help remind you to go about your coding the right way  ;) I'm hesitant to go the cookies route as a fair number of people don't use/resent them, but what I am really curious about is the caching method. How would this work and how could I go about implementing it? While I'm familiar with what caching is, I have never tried to do it with PHP before and don't really know where to begin with it.

OK I'll plan on doing that then. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on how to help reduce the strain from heavy traffic, I would love to hear it. Thanks for the help  :)

Another solution: [code]function validate($str, $mask) {   $validlength=10;   $str=strtolower($str);   if (strspn($str, $mask) == strlen($str) && $validlength >= strlen($str)) {       return true;   } else {       return false;   } } $str = "test"; $mask = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; validate($str,$mask);[/code] The $mask string contains all of the valid characters, so you could easily change it to 0123456789 to cover a form input meant only for numbers. This was taken from PHP.net a long time ago, but I can't remember the author's name to give proper credit :\

Sorry for being unclear--the $_SESSIONs would only be used for when they are viewing their own profile. Other member's information would be pulled from the database :D

You should check out some of the independent game communities out there for help with your idea. As Ginger said, no one can really help with the programming choices, but the communities can help you with creating a design document which can go a long way towards helping with the programming :D GL with it.

I am designing a backend to a website where user profiles play a major role. Rather than have hundreds of users on at once making queries to the database everytime they view their or another member's profile, I thought of storing all of the information in $_SESSION variables when they first log in. These variables could then be updated and refreshed should they edit any of their profile information. Are there any downsides to doing it this way? This is my first time creating a backend that has to take heavy traffic into account so I am fairly concerned about reducing the strain. Are there any other possible methods, tips or tricks I could use when it comes to this? Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions you can offer! Alex T