Best practice for storing session values?

Hi everyone, first time posting here.

[SIZE=4]The problem:[/SIZE]
I’ve got a messy site that I’m supposed to make faster and a big culprit seems to be the way it’s handling session values. Right now it has a bunch of functions like GetDeliveryType() and SetDeliveryType() and instead of retrieving the values once, it will do GetDeliveryType() every single time that value is needed in the code. The problem is these are doing [B]synchronous[/B] ajax calls (because most need to return the value to the code that is calling it) like so:

[CODE]
function SetDeliveryType(p_deliverytype) {
$.ajax({
type: “GET”,
url: “/cart/setCartDeliveryType”,
data: { deliverytype: p_deliverytype },
async: false,
success: function (response) {
//stores = JSON.parse(response);
//alert(response)
},
error: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
alert(“Exception in /order/SetDeliveryType : ” + errorThrown);
}
});
}[/CODE]

So I have blocking ajax calls everywhere firing potentially dozens of times per page load. As you might guess, this is horribly slow.

[SIZE=4]
The solution?[/SIZE]

I’m a junior developer and I’m having a hard time finding info on the best way to solve this. Ideally I would like to

failing that I would like to
2. Get values only once and then store them as variables and access them in native code. Is that viable?

or
3. Session storage or local storage? How would that work?

Whatever the right way to approach this is, could I also get a few pointers on how to set it up and get started? It would be much appreciated.

Also in #JavaScript _↴