PHP is a versatile language that gives the programmer many tools to get the job done. One such tool is sessions, but in some cases sessions can have a detrimental effect on your site’s performance.
Since switching from a Windows server to a UNIX server, I noticed a huge increase in overall site performance – but sometimes, with no noticeable pattern, a page would take a minute to load against the average which was under a second.
After messing with the scripts and painstakingly commenting out sections of code, I discovered that the problem lie quietly in the PHP sessions – specifically the session_start function. Perhaps it has something to do with disk operations and UNIX operating systems, whatever it was it was causing some frustrating performance problems.
