Enterprise PHP sessions (open letter to Mark Woodward)

[tbs-Gb/NUjX2UK8 at public.gmane.org (ref)]

Hi Mark,

I have been a member of BLU for almost two years now, and a small time
contributor (ref<tbs-Gb/NUjX2UK8 at public.gmane.org> is my account email), and recognized your
name when I found Mcache. I hope you dont mind if I ask you some
questions about it as I see you wrote it and I need a really good PHP
session management system. I am also opening this up to the list as it
may help the community ... If it needs to go off-list that is cool too.

I have a web farm that serves ~10 million page views a month (over
mobile), across 5 web servers. I currently store all session data on an
NFS mounted NAS. The NAS is on an independent network sub domain so as
not to affect web traffic.
We store peoples voluntarily given location in sessions, and a fair
amount of other data that will change as the user goes through their
experience with our site. Due to 'biz logic' requirements, the sessions
must remain live for a total of 10 years, although if they remain
untouched for 6 months, they can die.

We are now experiencing bottlenecking with the NAS and are looking for
other solutions. While googling I found your Mcache and was wondering
how far you had pushed it and if it could be a good solution for us ?

We are currently adding somewhere in the region of 2 million session
files a month, though 90% of that is 'fly by' and they will never
revisit. The other 10% will typically view 10 pages per user session.
Can Mcache/php sesison management handle that kind of traffic, or would
you steer me to other solutions ?

I not in favor of using a straight up DB solution if I can help it as
mySQL tends to suck at updates and we do a lot of session interaction
during a users view session. I am no that familiar with postgreSQL so
cannot comment on its ability either ...

 thanks for your time,

Richard



-- 
ref <tbs-Gb/NUjX2UK8 at public.gmane.org>