in a website, setting one cookie is better than setting many single cookies?

Question

Hi,

Suppose that you have to set 12 cookies, would it be better to store all of their values in a single "big" cookie or store each value on its own cookie? I want to know if that improves website speed.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The number of cookies is hardly going to affect speed in any meaningful way since either they'll all be sent through the request separated by Cookie: headers, or you'll have one Cookie: header with data concatenated in your own way. Technically, the "faster" way would be to use one cookie.

In reality, this is a micro-optimization and you shouldn't worry about it.

Answer 2

If there is any doubt the best thing to do is try it both ways and use a free utility like tcptrace to show you how much bandwidth each method consumes. That should definitively give you your answer, because if there is a difference in performance between the two methods you've proposed, it is probably due to bandwidth consumption.

Answer 3

You could always use sessions, which store the session ID in a cookie and store everything else in your database/filesystem referenced against that session ID. That way, the data is not sent on every request, only the session ID is.

Answer 4

I think the maximium size of a cookie is about 4k. If you need to store more data than that, then you're better off using several cookies.

i don't think there will be a big performance issue using multiple cookies. in my opinion, it may be more efficient to store each piece of data in its own cookie rather than parsing through a bogger cookie for each "crum" of data each time you need it.

Hope this helps!