Does a session variable stay in memory in php

Question

If I store contents of a text file in a session variable in php, will it stay in memory for the period of that session?

I have a small project where I need to perform searches in that specific text file which is just over 1mb. I'm thinking of using a session variable if it stays in memory, so that I don't have to read this file again and again.

Answer 1

No, sessions will be stored default in files (e.g. in /tmp). Of course, you can use the memory with for example memcached. It's also possible to use a database for sessions.

But, if you have enough memory, store your sessions in memory (very fast). Memcached is a great distributed memory object caching system. See http://memcached.org for more information.

And here about the memcached extension for php: http://php.net/manual/en/book.memcached.php