Sharing instances over requests/sessions

Hi,

Is there a mechanism within PHP for sharing data over
multiple requests that are not tied to a specific session.

I need to write a memory senstive cache in pure PHP. I
have an application which needs to store documents
from an application server elsewhere, due to the data
within the documents I can't write them to disk and I
have to minimise the amount of accesses to the server.

So my plan is to write something to store the documents
in a cache avaliable to all requests and store an access
key in the session. When a request is made for a
document that is not in the cache I'll do a quick check
to see if I need to free some space before I add the new
document. However the actual docs to remove will most
likely belong to a different session.

The question is, how do I create an instance of my cache
so it is available over different requests and users.

This was a trivial exercise in a java servlet, however
I now need to use PHP.

Thanks,

Vic

Regarding this well-known quote, often attributed to Vic's famous "1 Jun
2004 06:29:08 -0700" speech:

> Hi,
>
> Is there a mechanism within PHP for sharing data over
> multiple requests that are not tied to a specific session.
>
> I need to write a memory senstive cache in pure PHP. I
> have an application which needs to store documents
> from an application server elsewhere, due to the data
> within the documents I can't write them to disk and I
> have to minimise the amount of accesses to the server.
>
> So my plan is to write something to store the documents
> in a cache avaliable to all requests and store an access
> key in the session. When a request is made for a
> document that is not in the cache I'll do a quick check
> to see if I need to free some space before I add the new
> document. However the actual docs to remove will most
> likely belong to a different session.
>
> The question is, how do I create an instance of my cache
> so it is available over different requests and users.
>
> This was a trivial exercise in a java servlet, however
> I now need to use PHP.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Vic

Can you just serialize the data (if you even need to), then dump it to a
file?

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