Session Variable vs. Application variable

I'm looking for opinions. Which is better for load time, organization, server drain, etc. session variables or application variables?

Both are stored in memory so both are very fast. That said, I think you may want to do some additional reading, because session variables and application variables are meant to solve two totally different types of problems.

A session variable is specific to a single user, based on a cookie or an identifier passed in the URL. This would be something like a shopping cart or user login information.

An application variable is shared across all users of a single application (based on the name used in the cfapplication tag). So this would be useless for a shopping cart. But might be appropriate for caching the site menu, or creating a Singleton instance of a CFC.

Dont forget about Cookies, sometimes sessions dont retain, i use this alot

<CFIF isdefined("Session.Whatever")>
<CFSET COOKIE.Whatever>
</CFIF>


This is when Kiteless says "be careful with cookies not all users can utilize them"

Ps he would be right

Not only that but there are severe limits on the size of a cookie, as well as the number of cookies the browser will allow you to set per domain. Finally, trying to store large data sets or CFC instances are impossible with a cookie. Cookies are meant for storing extremely basic things like a session identifier, date of last visit, etc.

Another example between a applicaton and session variable is we use a application variable to set our company name so that we can display it on various relavant pages on our site

As our name does not change very often, this is a great way to use it for us because we can use the variable but do not have to create a include for this small piece of data.

Where for a registration form that we have on our site we create a session so that we can store different piece of data while the are progressing through the step by step form.