Session storage

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm in process of developing my first enterprise RoR application, and I'm wondering which kind of session storage to use. I've looked over a lot of stuff on the net (the very popular speed comparison, a few other highly rated [by Google] sites that talk about it), but these don't really clarify exactly what I want to know.

Once this site goes into production, it's going to have a pretty decent sized system behind it... more than enough RAM to go around, tons of disk space. What I'm wondering is, given that you have enough RAM that even with very heavy loads you're not going to run out, is using memory_store a good idea?

Right now, as it is in development, I'm using a pstore setup because there are only a few developers working on it, and when we test out the production environment, it's currently using a memory_store. I just don't know if that's a good idea when it goes live and the boxes are getting slammed.

Thanks, Luke

2

Hey Luke-

  I would say that you should use the ActiveRecord session store. If that doesn't perform well enough then switch to the mysql non AR session store from stefan kaeyes. Then if you really need more oomph you can use memcached for sessions. The normal memory cache session that comes with rails will not work if you have more then one rails process running. SO if you use more then one fcgi or mongrel the normal memory store is not an option.

-Ezra

3

Hey, thanks for the answer. I got another one in email, and that was appreciated also. I'm definitely thinking about using memcached, I will just have to spend the time learning how to set it up. Although, I have to say the following posters question is a good one... is there a way to use memcached and be able to flush the cache without destroying active sessions?