Re: what vars should go in session vars?

Nick, thanks for taking a moment to respond --

What I'm wondering is, what should I store in session variables?

Whatever you need to.

Thanks.

for the user, to influence the way the site behaves. But I was thinking of adding ten pre-set style sheets (diff't colors, fonts, etc), and the user can choose one of them and store it in "users.stylesheet" or

Or you could let them design their own styles and colors and save the choices in a cookie which is what most other sites do (or variations on the theme)

I see. This is basically what I was asking in the first place -- in the face of sessions, I had completely forgotten that cookies could be used for the same purpose and save the server the load, and even do so over the long term.

But then this could be taken farther -- where do you draw the line with user preferences that are pulled out of the database each time they are needed, or user preferences that are stored in a session to save database activity?

What kind of site is this? Is all this prettifying *really* needed?

A good point (it's not needed), but completely irrelevant to my question. I'm not asking for an answer about this one particular site per se, but rather so that I get a better sense of what other developers do when faced with the decision of storing a variable as a session variable or running database queries. "The big picture", rather than this particular issue, if you will.

Note that this setup is being run on Pentium II, 256MB RAM with approx 50 users total (only ten or so would ever be accessing the thing simultaneously, I imagine). It's not a public web site.

Your joking? No offence intended (don't you hate it when people say that?) but what on earth are you worried about 'performance issues' for. 10 users at a time? Sheeesh..... :=)

I must have forgotten to mention that I've never done this before, so forgive my over-cautiousness. But I'll take them as encouraging words -- now I don't need to worry quite so much about server load! Thanks Nick Erik