how *fast* are sessions?

"Alistair Baillie SE2002" <abaillie+usenet@cis.strath.ac.uk> wrote in
message news:3f3b4043$1@nntphost.cis.strath.ac.uk...
> Oliver Richman wrote:
> > Say you have 1000 users online.... 5,000... and each time you load a web
> > page of course the sessions will be activated. So there will be a flat
> > textfile on the system which will be constantly in use. Is this going to
be
> > a bottleneck? Have any studies been done about this?
> >
> > -frl
> >
> >
>
> Affects on server performance are minimal, most websites do it,
> including Amazon, AOL, Tesco, etc. think how many hits they get per hour
> (true they also have huge servers - but that aint the point).
>
> You can confiqure your server to use a mySQL database if you prefer, but
> again I dont think there is much diffrence - other than not having
> 10000's of text files on your server.
>
> Ali
>


If you're really worried about speed, create a ramdisk, configure a second
version of MySQL to run from said ramdisk and configure PHP sessions to use
that db. Hey presto, sessions are stored in RAM and fast as fook.

I've never tried this though, it's just a thought.

Nathan