Re: sql in php with paging

From: Walden H. Leverich
How do you know when you can release those connections?
20 minutes of inactivity? 120 minutes? 24 hours? What's your
"session" expiration time? It's these questions that make the
web so fun. :-)

Yes, the web is interesting to say the least. Good questions. I think Wells Fargo Bank uses persistent individual connections for Web access, but they also provide a "Signoff" link to terminate them. Users have control over the session. Or it expires after about 10 minutes of inactivity.

I'm not trying to be contrary. I mostly want to consider the options. I use separate individual jobs and persistent sessions for some applications, but follow the traditional HTTP model for others, where a single job / connection services multiple concurrent users. I think both models are useful. Paging is easier to implement and performs better if each user has a persistent connection. However, with persistent connections the number of users can have more impact on performance than the number of hits, as you're starting and stopping jobs.

That leads us to the question of whether we're deploying a few applications that serve a lot of people, or many applications that serve a few people. A shopping cart may be a relatively simple application that serves thousands of people, while an ERP system may actually be thousands of database maintenance, transaction processing, and report applications serving relatively few people. The former may be a better fit for the traditional Web model, while the latter may be a better fit for persistent individual connections, similar to a 5250 interface.

Nathan.