config files / shared memory

[Anon]

I'm somewhat new to PHP and am looking for advice. Here's the situation: I am developing an application that people access thru various affiliates. Each of these affiliates has slightly different business rules that are implemented thru the application (e.g., cobranding, link selection, etc...). Previously, I have been storing this information within the database; however, this has required a query to the database from each page to retrieve that affiliate's business rules for that specific page. Moving forward, I'd like to export the configuration for each affiliate into text files (perhaps XML) that reside on my web/php server.

With this approach in mind, what are my best options for being able to access these affiliate config files as users come thru my site? I'd prefer not to include the appropriate config file on each page, nor to stuff the data into a user's session (due to performance reasons). Instead, I'd like to have a shared memory location for each of the distinct configuration files that can be accessed thru some type of global application variable for each affiliate specific user.

Thanks for any insight/advice.

Dean

[Anon]

We are doing sort of the same thing - needing to keep track of inforamtion for various users. I decided to use an LDAP server. By nature of LDAP, most information will be stored in RAM. If you see that as an option, check out www.openldap.org

[Anon]

The problem is that I want to keep the PHP tier isolated from having to access other services (for uptime purposes). My hope is to load a configuration file (or multiple affiliate specific configuration files) into shared memory within the PHP server so that I can have fast configuration access and prevent having to access other services to retrieve it.

Thanks for your input.

Dean