What is the most efficient way to check if user is logged in?

Question

I am pretty familiar with the Facebook SDK and API but I still find myself having a lot of trouble with it. Most of all, speed!

Each time I execute an 'api' call, it takes an additional second or two to return a response. I would therefore like to know what the most efficient and fastest way to detect whether a user is logged in via Facebook is. I am currently using:

        // Get the User ID of the facebook user
        $facebook_user_id = $this->facebook->getUser();

        // If a facebook user exists, then try to get their information
        if($facebook_user_id){
            try{
                // Get the facebook users details
                $facebook_user_name = $this->facebook->api('/me','GET');
                $this->facebook_logged_in = $facebook_user_id;
                return $this->unique_id = $this->facebook_logged_in;
            }catch(FacebookApiException $e){
                error_log($e);
                return false;
            }
        }else{
            return false;   
        }

This works to a certain extent but it is awfully slow. I literally want to know whether the user is logged in and their session is valid. Is there another way to go about doing this? Why is it so slow?

Answer 1

In most all of facebook's PHP examples, they tend to use $uid = $facebook->getUser(); see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/facebook-getUser/

And then they check if the $uid is 0, then not logged in. if other than 0, then you have their facebook user id.

Looks like you're calling the /me command additionally when you really don't need to. Also to make the /me call quicker, specify the fields=Comma,List,Of,Fields,You,Need so the query can operate quicker. But as noted above, for just getting login status, check for 0 in $uid.