[thelist] in-principle, PHP/mySQL shopping basket question

[Aredridel]

On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 14:56, Hassan Schroeder wrote:
> Chris W. Parker wrote:
> 
> > But Java isn't an interpreted language is it? What I mean by that is,
> > isn't it a bit more powerful than a regular scripting language such as
> > PHP or ASP? Can't it just sit around in the background and wait for
> > something to happen?
> 
> Uh, well. It's actually a function of the session management in the
> servlet container (say, Tomcat). If PHP has session timeouts, then
> I'd think there must be *something* running as a background process
> to keep track. But maybe not. Interesting question.

Nope -- it has a lazy garbage collector.

If your site has no hits, no sessions will time out.

If you get a few, they may persist a lot longer on disk than you'd
expect... 

Basically, each session started has a chance of triggering cleanup of
timed-out sessions.  When that chance happens, PHP just pauses a moment
and cleans house.

Ari