HELP Cookies Not Working

Anon

According to Netscape's cookie spec, the limits for cookies are as follows:
<PRE>
300 total cookies (which is browser settable now I think).

4 kilobytes per cookie.

20 cookies per server or domain. Completely specified hosts and domains are considered separate entities, and each has a 20 cookie limitation.
</PRE>

I am attempting to set 16 cookies and the total weight of all the data is 8k. However when I attempt navigate to a different page I'm getting the following error:
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

It seems to be attempting to pass all the data in one cookie that exceeds the 4k size limit allowed for a cookie.

I'm using the following function to set the cookies:
FUNCTION insert_data_into_cookie($array_w_q_data,$num_of_cookie) {
GLOBAL $data;
$temp = serialize($array_w_q_data);
setcookie ("data$num_of_cookie",$temp,"");
return;
};

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this.

thanks,
Bryan

reagent

What are you trying to store in a cookie? Is there a better way to go about doing this? I would think using sessions would help out, but there may not be a need to store it on the client at all.

If you give me more info, maybe I can help you find a better solution

Anon

I'm storing text that is pulled from the DB and displayed on every page.
I built it using cookies vs. sessions because I thought that cookies would minimize the memory requirements of the server in the event of heavy traffic.

I orginally was going to query the DB for every page but quickly realized that this would give me horrible DB performance.

I do think that sessions would increase speed and would alleviate this problem that I am running into, but I worry about the scalability of the project.

8k per user can add up pretty fast.

Is my thinking correct?

Bryan

reagent

I'd first think about what this data is. Is this user specific data that needs to be carried around to every page that they visit, or is it some text in the db that is used for all visitors to the site that can be cached every so often?