What is the best way to maintain state in a CGI script?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was curious as to what method people use to maintain session information in CGI scripts. When a user goes from page to page on my site, each page is processed by a cgi script. What is the best way to maintain state and login information? Should I create a file that contains a random key along with the user login and use that to carry state information? Or should I add a row to a database table for each user in maintaining state? In other words, is database access or file access going to be faster?

Thanks,
Tom

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

Comment on What is the best way to maintain state in a CGI script?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: What is the best way to maintain state in a CGI script? by merlyn (Sage) on Sep 28, 2000 at 03:15 UTC
See Adding "state" to HTTP.	[reply]
Re: What is the best way to maintain state in a CGI script? by Russ (Deacon) on Jan 12, 2007 at 00:10 UTC
For more info, see the Categorized Question How can I authenticate HTTP sessions?.	[reply]
Re: What is the best way to maintain state in a CGI script? by AgentM (Curate) on Sep 28, 2000 at 08:07 UTC
Take an example from Perlmonks.org: one monolithic perl script (and that funky last node thang!) Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.	[reply]