General Memory Allocation

[AMV]

Does anyone know of a way to allocate memory from PHP that persists in between script invocations? In other words, I'd like to allocate a block of PHP-controlled memory when a script executes, place whatever data in it, and then read that data again provided I have the proper handle in a subsequent instance of either the same script or a different one. I can't seem to find anything in the PHP API for it.

[Rohan_Hill]

Your best bet would be writing the data to a file 🙂

[AMV]

No I know, my goal though is to physically keep it in RAM.

[nemonoman]

PHP ain't set up to work like you describe. File handling should very fast on your server. It's more and more likely the file will be in a RAM disk on many servers -- so what's the biggie?

[ednark]

im not 100 percent sure but i think that doing this with web based php would not be possbile .. as your server should open a new instance of php for every request.. then a garbage collector would go to work on your shite and make it all go away...

i think you asking for something like a what a java server like oracle9i implements called a Java Container... where Java is always running in a shared but internally partioned memory segment... and each java request gets handled by the Container.... actually each Jsp page is actually in a sense its own little persistant application running under the container... so it does not have to be reparsed every page hit... and you can also use staticly declared variables to be persistant across each page load, not just across a specific users hits using a session variable.. interesting stuff that is

i think the container is hard to make happen... as even apache's tomcat doesn't get around to making a full java container... as you would need full knowledgable parcipiation of the server to function...

i don't see any malloc like functions anywhere to be found in the php functino list...

perhaps im just confused about how apache handles mod_php... is that a persistant segment of memory that apache handles for use by php?

now ill rate the factual knowledge confidence in this post at about 50% as im most a php guy and not a java guy... so i welcome anyone who can correct me.. and mabye someone that knows more about this can hopefully shed more light on this thread

[bj_]

Isn't that what the shared memory functions are for? Or is he doing something different.

[crosbystillsnas]

think bj is right....
shared memory, semaphore, ipc.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.sem.php

[ednark]

oops yes your absolutely right.. i had not read over these functions before...

the shm sem msg_ functions should be right up the alley of what you (AVM) are looking for

so most of my last post was just out my rear it seems, looks like php does have the functionality to do it by itself