Is it a good idea to store small amounts non user data in a PHP session

Question

I am wondering what the best practice way is to store small amounts of data across a site. For example you access an API you retrieve some non sensitive, non user data and you want to use it across your site to add functionality, reference dates of a last event etc.

I have an idea that I could do this via the session variable, to avoid hitting the API every request etc. Is that a good idea or is it bad practice? If it's bad practice what other approaches should I take?

Answer 1

That's fine to do it that way, in fact, that's part of what sessions are all about. If you want to store it long term (after the user destroys the session), store it in the database and reference it when needed.

Answer 2

A nice alternative is Memcached, because putting information in a session will be visible only for the current client.

Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Here you can find more information about memcache: http://php.net/manual/en/book.memcache.php