Session Management in TWebModule

Question

I am using a TWebModule with Apache. If I understand correctly Apache will spawn another instance of my TWebModule object if all previous created objects are busy processing requests. Is this correct?

I have created my own SessionObject and have created a TStringList to store them. The StringList is created in the initialization section at the bottom of my source code file holding the TWebModule object. I am finding initialization can be called multiple times (presumably when Apache has to spawn another process).

Is there a way I could have a global "Sessions" TStringlist to hold all of my session objects? Or is the "Safe", proper method to store session information in a database and retrieve it based on a cookie for each request?

The reason I want this is to cut down on database access and instead hold session information in memory.

Thanks.

Answer 1

As Stijn suggested, using a separate storage to hold the session data really is the best way to go. Even better is to try to write your application so that the web browser contains the state inherently in the design. This will greatly increase the ability to scale your application into the thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent users with much less hardware.

Intraweb is a great option, but suffers from the scale issue in the sense that more concurrent users, even IDLE users, require more hardware to support. It is far better to design from the onset a method of your server running as internally stateless as possible. Of course if you have a fixed number of users and don't expect any growth, then this is less of an issue.