Hello,
everybody.
We are developing an iPhone app which supported by a server-side that would be thousands of users online simultaneously such as Facebook or GTalk else.
What we want to implement is sending users present location periodically(e.g., 10mins) generated by GPS to the server-side for processing. And compare users' locations to find out who are around you. (Maybe this is something called as LBS)
So we think that users would not be inactivated(such as session timeout) until they logouted by themselves manually as theirs location information would be compared time and time again.
Then, how could we store location information for each user?
I saw some articles that suggest manage them in database, but some said session or cookie else.
But with so many users, database is said to be very bad performance, others said session is too many and should be set to timeout in a shot while and cookie is a bad practice...
So guys, what is the common way to deal with this issue?
*By the way, we are using CakePHP1.3 and Xampp env for the server-side.
Best regards,
tech_me
One of the strengths of databases is searching through stored information, you'll most certainly want to use some kind of database since in this case you'll want to search for nearby users.
Sessions are usually used for information that is only relevant to one single user, not such a good fit for this case (although you could store session data in a database and possibly be able to search through them, it's probably not a very good design)
Cookies are really a way for the server to store information in the browser that is passed back to the server with every HTTP request, this won't really help you in this case either.
How about having the application send its location every few minutes, storing it in a database with a timestamp, and if the timestamp is older than say 30 minutes, just consider the user offline?