Re: PHP web farms (i.e. why msession or something like it)

At 10:20 25/05/2002 -0400, mlwmohawk@mohawksoft.com wrote:

I kind of went off in a huff yesterday with the whole PECL/pear issue with msession, it's over and lets move on. I did, however, want to explain *why* I think msession should be in the main code. In *big* websites, you need multiple web servers serving copies of the same data in a load balanced environment. The PHP session code, in its native state, can not manage this efficiently. You need some sort of external session management system. Putting aside msession or SRM for the moment, the capability of linking multiple PHP web servers is vital. As one scans the PHP site, it is not immediately obvious how this is done, or that it can be done at all. You have to do a bit of digging to figure out how to do it. I have worked as a software developer for almost 20 years now, and it has become obvious to me that people in charge of making technology decisions are not as technically savvy as we would like or is often assumed. They NEED to be spoon-fed. If they have to look for something, they will probably assume it does not exist and opt for the solutions that are marketed at them. Obviously I think msession is pretty good, but SRM works too. Regardless of which, or even either, PHP needs to make an ?enterprise? statement. Marginalizing this capability IMHO is not the right direction, I think there should, in fact, be a stronger push for this sort of capability to be built in by default.

I agree. I also think that a solution like msession should be pushed despite the work on SRM because many PHP programmers will not want to go in the SRM direction but will want a plug-and-play solution for the most common PHP 2-tier Apache <-> DB solution. Andi