Server-side session doubts using cache or cookie sessions

Question

I am new to web development. I work with Flask, Sqlalchemy and Postgresql.

As I understand it, each new request is like a new program stream. A new sqlalchemy session is created, with which we manage our db operations and return a response. After that, the new thread is also closed and connections are returned to the pool.

I log in to the user system and get all user data in the orm object of the user. I saved it in a jar session variable that uses cookie. Now I also want to save some other user data for the range of the entire user session, not the request. I have doubts about storing all this data in a cookie for two reasons:

1. Unnecessary data travel back and forth. 2. data can be read easily. 

Are my doubts valid?

So my other questions are:

• Am I correct at some level to avoid getting some session data in each request without falling into the trap of premature optimization? or Should I worry about this later, when the need arises, and now focus only on creating a working application?

• An alternative to a cookie-based session is a server-side session, which can be done using redis or memcache. Where does the Beaker library get into this? Is this a separate thing or its use in combination with redis or memcache?

Answer 1

Most browsers support cookies up to 4096 bytes in size. ( Source )

If you want to save more than that, you should use a server session such as Redis or Memcache. It is very easy to replace the default cookie session interface for Flask with a Redis or Memcache interface. There is a great snippet for Armin for redis . If you prefer memcache, you can replace the redis material of this fragment with the same memcache methods.;)