Magento Session Data choose (file system or database )

Filesystem Session storage

Remember that innocuous setting during Magento install that asks you if you want to store your sessions on disk or in the database? Well if you are like me, you normally choose filesystem, not knowing any better and having never bothered to test or research the consequences (until now)

The benefits of file-based sessions for Magento are simplicity, stability and durability. It's simple because you don't have to do anything to set it up. It's stable because most modern filesystems use journaling to make sure that in the event of a system crash your session data is consistent. It's also durable, because a system restart will not cause you to lose your session data. Coming back to a webstore a week later and not having your items in your cart is annoying, right?

To enable file-based storage, choose it during installation or in your app/etc/local.xml file simply make sure you have a session_save tag like this:

1	<session_save><![CDATA[files]]></session_save>

Note: Look in app/etc/local.xml.additional for examples but ignore the comment about empty defaulting to files, you need the word files in there.

I have performance benchmarked filesystem storage in the Benchmark section below.

Database Session storage

Database session storage is the other storage type, the one you probably didn't choose during install, and forgot to circle back round and find out if you should have. With database session storage the session data is stored in the Magento MySQL database. The connection used is the same as the core connection.

One of the key benefits of using database sessions is the clustered environment support. In a filesystem based session storage scheme, if you have more than one Magento frontend node in a cluster, they will need to share session data (unless you use a loadbalancer with sticky sessions) and the database gives you that capability quite easily.

Databases also have good stability and durability during crashes and reboots.

One of the problems with database session storage is that it adds more load to the database. On large catalog sites with many SKUs, or busy sites with lots of sessions, this can hurt the database performance.

To use the database for session storage simply have this in your local.xml:

1	<session_save><![CDATA[db]]></session_save>

Check out the benchmarks below to see how well database session storage performs.

Regards,

 
 HERY PURNAMA
 MCDBA, ITILF, PMP, CISA
 IT & Management Trainer

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