process-wide static variables.

[Anon]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to have a global variable that is kept across requests.

For example, I'd like to load a dictionary from a file into memory once per Apache process, and that's it.

Right now, I load it at every request, which is very costly.

The only way I have found around that so far is to write my own module.

But I can't believe php doen't have support for this already.

Blaise

[Anon]

Normally I'd recommend looking at the session_*() functions. Why would you need to load a whole "dictionary" into the process memory space? Hopefully the dictionary isn't an unabridged one.

-- Michael
Darkstreak Computing & Innovations
www.darkstreak.com

[[deleted]]

Quite right.

If anything is loaded into memory at all, it must be loaded because it is required. You should ofcourse never load anything that is not used.

Dictionaries are a classic example of what not to load into memory. This is what databases have been designed for.

If you feel you must load it into memory at all costs (which you don't) then look at the shared memory functions.

[Anon]

Well, the session_* are not really doing what I need :
1) The storage is on a per-user basis.
2) I believe it uses the file-system and serialization.

And, yes, I need to load the dictionary into memory : those are used for spell-checking and stemming. (It is not a bg dictionary, but it is costly anyway)

Blaise