PHP Sessions & Hard Drive integrity

Creating and unsetting many sessions; impact on hard drive

[max4]

Hello,

I've noticed that I'm using sessions quite a bit to keep track of data and plan on undertaking a project that will use even more sessions. From what I understand, when a session is created a file is also created on the server. My use of sessions involves creating them, and then unsetting them when I'm done with them; sometimes this unsetting occurs at the end of a page, sometimes soon after the session is created.

I'm concerned that all this session setting and unsetting will cause the hard drive to become heavily fragmented; especially with large amounts of traffic. Is there need for concern here or should I proceed with my project?

Thank you.

[mcavic]

If this is a Linux server, it won't be a problem at all. Linux is equipped to handle a large number of files, and fragmentation is rarely an issue, if ever.

Windows can choke on a folder with thousands of files, but if the overall site/server performance is good, the sessions really shouldn't make much of a difference.

[max4]

Thank you mcavic. It will be a Linux server.

[jkovar]

sometimes this unsetting occurs at the end of a page, sometimes soon after the session is created.

You might want to look into using memcache [php.net] (it provides a session.save_handler) , especially if you're creating and deleting sessions within the same request often.

Sessions don't have to be saved on disk.

[lammert]

If there is no need to keep sessions during a server reboot, you can create a partition as an automatically sizing ramdisk with the tmpfs attribute in /etc/fstab and mount this partition at the location where you normally store your sessions. See man mount for more details.