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

mlwmohawk@mohawksoft.com wrote: >> I agree that msession is better than using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a >> session manager. However, most people who use PHP on web farms >> already have some sort of database set up, so it seems logical to me >> to be able to use it for storing sessions. MySQL actually isn't too >> bad, as long as you use HASH (in-memory) tables. > > That is where I disagree. At my last gig we used a combination of Oracle > and PostgreSQL. The session management was a bigger Oracle hit than the > rest of the site. It was horrible. It was partially some of this > experience that encouraged me to do msession. > > The msession daemon can be setup on a backend box and completely > forgotten. No table space worries, no query optimizaton. > Well, you didn't try it with MySQL, which is significantly faster than Oracle and Postgres for most stuff. In any case, I agree that msession is probably a better solution -- I just think that having built-in MySQL session support would be a good thing for PHP. >> >> MySQL. They weren't all serving the same content, but almost all of >> them were sharing a session. > > How many session transactions did you get per second? (i.e. select session > data, update/insert session data) > > I would not suspect that MySQL could do this very well because it does not > support NVCC and updates lock the entire table. I have no idea -- I do know that we never had any troubles with the box that had the session database on it. Incidentally, MySQL using InnoDB tables supports MVCC and row-level locking. However, I suspect that in this case the InnoDB tables would actually be slower than the table-locking MyISAM tables.