Hi:
We're planning on migrating to an Apache::Session + mysql approach for
managing session state, for a large-ish site hosted on multiple servers.
While there have been many useful discussions on this list concerning the
technologies involved, I haven't seen many war stories from the field, as
it were.
I have some specific questions - hopefully someone out there has had to
address these issues and may have some good advice.
a) If your site runs on multiple servers, do you attempt to cache session
state records on the web server for any length of time after they are
retrieved from the DBMS ? and if so, how do you handle cache consistency
across all your servers - (we have rather blind load balancing hardware in
front of our server farm with no way of implementing any kind of server
affinity that I am aware of)
b) Does anyone have redundant database servers ? If so ... are there any
implementation gotchas ? and if you have a single server, how does session
management work when it goes down ? (I'm pretty happy with the hardware -
Suns - which we have, but a disk can go at any time....)
c) This is more of a mysql question.... When do people consider a session
to have expired ? and what is the best strategy for deleting expired
sessions from a database, especially given that mysql's table based locking
seems to leave a bit to be desired if you're trying to mix update
operations with a big SELECT/DELETE to purge expired sessions ?
TIA
- Simon
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Simon Rosenthal ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Web Systems Architect
Northern Light Technology 222 Third Street, Cambridge MA 02142
Phone: (617)577-2796 : URL: http://www.northernlight.com
"Northern Light - Just what you've been searching for"
