[Phpwebsite-developers] Memory Constraints

[Matthew M. <ma...@tu...>]

Greetings,

Recently I received an email from someone having problems running 0.9.0.
https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=772701&forum_id=163758

According to them, Fallout is using too much memory. They have a limit of
8MB on their host.

I am not positive this is the fault of our software, however we are
leaning heavily upon sessions for speed.

For example, there is a session that holds all of the templates as they
are run. This prevents them from the template files having to get loaded
each time a template is used. Now my initial thought was "how big could it
get?" It is, after all just text. Am I wrong? Could the storage of these
templates cause an overhead?

Another example is Calendar. To speed up the pulling of events and views I
am storing information in sessions. For example, calculating the month
view is taxing on the CPU but once it is created, it is shoved in a
session array like so:
$_SESSION["Calendar"]["monthView"][$year][$month][$day]
This allows flipping between different months to go much faster. There is
also a session for the events so they do not have to be pulled from the
database more than once.

What I am worried about however is are we unbalancing the scale. I would
think sessions would be small values. All the code for Fallout itself is
close to 8MB (including the images and CVS directories anyway).

So do sessions take up that much space? If so, we will need to rethink
some things. We will need to abandon the current caching format of
templates. In its place we could use the PEAR cache class, however it
normally uses temporary files. This would be a new directory to teach
people how to set.

Let me hear your opinion...

Matthew McNaney
Internet Systems Architect
Electronic Student Services
Appalachian State University
Phone: 828-262-6493
phpwebsite.appstate.edu
ess.appstate.edu