[Web-SIG] and now for something completely different!

[mike bayer]

if I may throw my hat in the ring here, the session object I have built
for Myghty accomplishes the following things, which were the important
facets of a session for me:

- it is neutral of its backend storage system.  I developed a simple
"storage" API that currently has DBM, memory and plain file-based systems
and people have also been clamoring for a memcached version which is easy
enough to add.  Myghty uses this backend containment system both for its
page caching and session libraries.

- the backend storage system supplies locking which locks amongst threads
and processes; the session implementation insures that this lock is only
against its own session ID.  I was basically going for an improvement over
mod_python's session, which locks all sessions against a single apache
global mutex, and stores everyone's session in one huge DBM file.  my
session object, when using file-based containment, always keeps every
session's information in separate files and was modeled after
Apache::Session in this regard.

- because a "read" operation also registers a "last accessed time" data
member, its not using multiple reader/single writer style locking,
everyone is a writer.  However, since I am sensitive to iframes, ajax
calls, and dynamic image calls hitting the same session concurrently
within a request which I'd rather not slow down, I do something less than
optimal which is I open the session store and read the full thing into
memory first when its accessed, and then immediately unlock.  This
obviously can create problems for an application that is storing huge
amounts of data in its session which is not required in full for any one
request.

Two improvements to this behavor would be to either make the "last
accessed time" be written out just once per request and then to allow
multiple readers, or to improve the containment API to supply "last
accessed time" automatically.

I mostly was using Apache::Session as a guide to the architectural
features I wanted to see, which include flexibility of containment and
locking systems as well as a separation between individual sessions.

- mike