[dev] thoughts on the prefs problem

[Jon Parise]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 06:20:35PM -0500, Jon Parise wrote:

[Revisiting another old thread]

> > How about instead (along with the "override prefs" checkbox)
> > defining a "session" prefs driver, that stores preferences in the
> > php4 session and thus lets you have prefs that only last the length
> > of the session?
> 
> That's a good idea.  Ideally, however, all of the preference drivers
> should use session storage for their data.  In my latest revision of
> the preferences code, I didn't optimize the entire process.  Every
> page load retrieves the user's preferences from storage.  This could
> all be streamlined so that it will only contact the preference storage
> when necessary.
> 
> I did optimize the "write" action, however, but there's really no need
> to retrieve the full preferences set on every load when we're already
> pulling session data.
> 
> I'll try and work on cleaning this up over the next couple of days.
 
I've basically closed this issue with the introduction of the
preferences "cache".  The preferences subsystem now behaves optimally
in the case of both reading and writing (meaning it only hits the
preferences storage server when there is know new or stale data).

Does anyone have any outstanding comments on this, or should I
consider this particular aspect of the preferences system finished
(for the time being, anyway)?

-- 
Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu)  .  Rochester Inst. of Technology
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/  :  Computer Science House Member