I am writing a completely new website, and I would like to make sure that it scales easily if I ever get to the place where I have to host the site on several machines with load balancer.
Website user can be authenticated. In other words, I need to save some status information. My first reflex was to use Session variables, but then I will limit myself to one machine. I know that there are ways to store session variables externally (in the database, redis, memcached), but are these the only options?
What is the alternative to a session variable? How do Facebook and other major websites do this?
PS I'm not looking for another session handler (DB, redis, etc.). I would like to know if there is a way to completely get rid of session variables.
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