title: Page load time with Cookie vs Session in PHP
body: <p>I have a social network type site (member site) I store a lot of user data like username, userID number, email, first name, photo URL, into a user session when the user logs in to cut down on the ammount of DB queries per page.  I sometimes hear people talk about using cookies for some things, I realize cookies should never be used for username/passwords but mu main question is, does a cookie slow down the page loading time?  On a user's homepage I have blocks that a user can drag and drop to re-arrange there homepage, my first version I stored the location of the blocks in a cookie, I now store this value in mysql and I build the locations of the block in php on page load instead of using javascript to set the initial locations.  When I first used cookies to set there locations though the page would load and the blocks would be in there original location, the page would then really fast change the location of these blocks from the value it got from the cookie, however this was much much slower and made the page seem really slow to load.  I have always thought cookies were slow since then but maybe it wasn't the cookie that slowed it down.  </p>
  
  <p>So do cookies slow a page down?</p>