As far as Google searches tell me, the maximum allowed number of cookies depends very much on the browser, however I cannot find any recent data as to how much cookies are allowed on modern browsers.
I need to store a somewhat large number of user preferences in cookies (for not-yet-registered users), so what would be the best way of doing that? (Also, those cookies would be accessed both via javascript client-side and php server-side)
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From the rfc:
at least 300 cookies
at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the size of the characters that comprise the cookie non-terminal in the syntax description of the Set-Cookie header)
at least 20 cookies per unique host or domain name
Those are minimum requirements. The IE6 team didn't get that. Everything else is highly browser-specific. You'd better write a test-platform to test each browser. Test the maximum size and number with little incremental steps (and check if they still are readable).
Also, I seem to remember apache has a problem with huges numbers of cookies. Can't remember where i've seen that though.
Here is a little cookie-testing script: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/stuff/javascript/maximum-cookies/
