yes, that old nutshell. though in my searches, there appears to be surprisingly few pearls in all the swine which actually discuss in some kind of detail (a la the cookbook) the relative merits of the various solutions.

the problem is: i'd like to have a persistent data structure or set of RDMS data which persists across multiple cgi script sessions.

the best methods that i can envisage for doing this are:

• using disk-based DB files -- though might there be a problem with concurrency? one could flock, but then will this limit performance with many concurrent users?
• using temporary DB tables -- but does this impact performance too greatly?? how does one ensure that temporary tables get deleted in due course? and how might one go about protecting oneself from a malicious user who just hammered the server with broad queries?
• http cookies -- this is probably unacceptable for reasons of security -- i would ideally like to cache a whole sql WHERE clause for instance.
• hidden CGI params -- same as above, but more complicated
• a slightly more elaborate solution involving some king of daemon which caches data per host.

i'm sure a million monks have broached and solved all these issues dozens of times... can anyone offer me some wisdom? my particular site uses MySQL and the database involved is only fairly small.

advice, comparisons, and links all greatly appreciated.

j.a.dirty.p.h

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