Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
I gave this little bit of Magento code an ugh on Twitter.
#File: app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Resource/Session.php
public function __destruct()
{
session_write_close();
}
Why? Because PHP automatically calls __destruct when it cleans up memory for an object, which means this code could potentially close and save the session before the PHP request finishes. This, in turn, could make sessions appear broken to a client programmer.
Now, this doesn’t happen with a stock Magento because Magento core code instantiates the session resource as a Magento singleton
Mage::getResourceSingleton('core/session');
Magento’s singleton implementation keeps a reference to the object around for the entire request, so PHP never calls __destruct.
However, if you instantiate the resource model as a regular model (because you wanted to reuse the “read/write sessions from database” code), you’ve created a potential bug if PHP garbage collects your model instance.
The solution, of course, is don’t do that, but relying on PHP’s __destruct method for something other than memory cleanup in an object that’s not guaranteed to stay a singleton seems sketchy at best, and destined to cause problems for developers who need to make customizations to session storage.