'Best Practices' question

[james2010]

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on a 'best practices' type question. I've done a script that pulls a lot of user information (ie contact list, personal setting etc.) out of the database when the user logs in and stores it in a session which is accessed on nearly every page. I was wondering if this is good coding practice and if it does anything to optimize or take away from my site in contrast with doing new queries for some if not all this information every time each page is accessed.

[Mordecai]

It'll run a little slower, how much depends on the queries. Theoretically, though, you only visit one page without the information (since it will be put into the session when it's retrieved), so I suppose that it's also better (than pulling info every time).

[Jack_Slocum]

Depending on your session storage (mysql vs file based) it is being queried for anyway. Either from disk or the db. So you won't see any performance gain by placing simple query results into the session, it's just more convenient. Where you could gain performance would be if you are storing more complex queries. For example, selecting a couple session variable from a session table would be much faster than doing a join on multiple large tables on every request.