[RESOLVED] session or cookie for storing information

[lpa]

Every time when user makes a click, my website checks for friends who are online and shows the total number.

To reduce the server load I decided to make changes so that only once every 3 minutes script makes a MySQL query to update the number of online friends and the rest of the time it displays information stored in a session or in a cookie:

$timestamp:$number_of_friends

What is better - to store this information in a cookie or as a session variable?

Thanks.

[NogDog]

If you're using sessions already, then I would just use another session variable, which means you won't add any more data to be sent back and forth between the browser and host.

[sneakyimp]

Generally speaking, sessions use cookies to store a session id but maintain the data on the server -- which is very useful when you are trying to output some HTML that says "you have 23 friends online". If you store the number-of-friends value in a cookie then you have to output HTML which references javascript (which may or may not work depending on user's browser capabilities) which fetches the cookie and tries to output the number of friends variable to the page.

Using sessions on your server means that your server has to store session-related data either in a file or database for each user session -- this might mean that Javascript could be used to reduce the load on your server but it would depend on a number of things. Your post isn't really clear about what exactly your are doing so it's hard to say.

[lpa]

thanks