php sessions

[Anon]

Hey,
how efficient are php sessions?
If a site is going to be hit with many people who log in...is it better to use cookies and database than just php sessions?
any ideas would be appreciated!~

p.s ActiveServerpages sessions are considered bad bad especially for a scalable application

[Anon]

PHP sessions can be configured to use a database as the persistent storage medium. If you're scaling up by implementing a server farm, that's probably the best way of sharing the storage across servers.

Generally, though, the filesystem is faster than connecting with a database to retrieve a little flat chunk of data.

[Anon]

Quote from Steve:

Generally, though, the filesystem is faster than connecting with a database to retrieve a little flat chunk of data

End quote

This in not correct if the database is stored RAM and is located on the local machine.. Then DataBase is much faster than flat files...

Andreas