Using memcached/APC for session storage?

Question

Hi everybody,

I had some thoughts back ago about using memcached for session storage, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be sufficient in the event of one or more of the servers in the memcached pool were about to go down.

A hybrid version is to save the main database (mySQL) from load caused by reads would be to work out a function that tries to fetch the data from the cache pool, and if that fails gets it from the database.

After putting some more thought into it, I started to think about using APC cache for session related data. If our web server would go down, sessions would be lost either way, so storing them in a local APC or a localhost memcached server maybe isn't that bad?

What's your experiences?

Answer 1

Generally, session data is something which should be treated as volatile in any situation. The user can always choose to eliminate the cookie themselves at any point (if you are using cookies, of course). For this reason, I see no problem with using memcached for session data.

For me, I'd just keep it simple - no need for a DB fallback unless you absolutely must never lose the user's session in the event of a memcached server failure. As I said at the beginning, I always treat sessions as purely volatile in any case and don't really store anything of any significance in them.

That's my two cents anyways.