[thelist] Passing a very large data session-wide.

Thu Sep 8 16:00:31 CDT 2005

>Why not store it in a database, then delete the record when the
>transaction has succeeded? Surely given your environment this is faster
>than accessing the filesystem twice, and should scale better than
>storing it in the session.

This may be an option too. 

It should be Typically in the form:

UID (autoincrement)  |   SessionID(varchar-primary)  |  Actual
Data(BLOB or Text whatever)

i guess.

Let me try to explain the file a bit more.

The file looks like.

<html>
...
some css for @media print and @media screen.
...
<h2>heading of section 1 which is gathered dynamically</h2>
<table>...<td>some static content here ... some dynamic content from db</td>
<h2>heading of section two</h2>
<table>... <td>

<table>
... lots of numbers and data rendered within a 
<td><pre>dynamic data</td></table>

...yet another table
notes, disclaimers and references retrieved from db.

</html>

I cannot give very much detail due to confidentiality issues.

The final html is a legally approved copy (people pay money for it)
and we have to store it "as it is" somewhere (it's nonsense but "as it
is" means including the css and javascript references in the file as
well :) ).

> 
> Just how big is this puppy (file) going to be?
> 

A few hundered KB's, at most one megabyte I hope.

We have other sorts of files which are 10-50KB size (report files) and
we use the gzip approach with them. Though those files are not very
frequently generated and thus do not bring an overhead. Plus, they are
generally created via a scheduled task which execute from midnight to
early morning.