Re: Overwhelming a Web Application Server

At what point do you decide to purge the DB record? Do you had a batch job that periodically removes the records? Seems to me that tens of thousands of records accumulating daily would lead to some space/size issues eventually, even if they are "nit" sized. I am guessing there isn't much, even in transition, that you stored in relation to a session. In my Java app there can be some fairly large objects that get attached to the session temporarily to save DB I/O. Serializing them to the DB, even for a few seconds seems pretty expensive, might as well just do the DB I/O directly again, rather than serialize the object.

However, I jumped into the discussion mid stream so I may be well down a rabbit hole that is irrelevant.

Pete


Walden H. Leverich wrote:

But sessions are a different story - we've already established that

they

often consume a lot of resources.

Given that I would never store session state in memory, I disagree. I'll
take the performance hit and store them in a DB when I use them. I want
the stability the DB provides me. So, unused sessions that are just
hanging out really don't cost anything more than a little disk space,
and next to the audit-log tables, session tables are a nit. :-)

I assume that database servers have limits to client connections

(J2EE, PHP,

and .Net developers should know more about that than me - I'm an RPG

programmer).

Never tried to limit the number of connections, I assume it can be done.
By the time you factor in key to wait time for the apps we're running we
can satisfy something like 500 users per active DB connection (5000
users w/10 connection, 50,000 w/100 connections, etc.) so there's little
point in limiting the connections. But out avg DB request is well < 1ms,
and page loads (some taking 100s of db requests) are running well < 1s.

-Walden