Store the PHP superglobal until restarting the Apache server
Is there a way to store a variable in server RAM using Apache 2 and PHP, holding it until the server shuts down? I need to store a very large array (hashmap) that needs to be initialized once (not once for the user, for example, only when the server starts up) and accessed from different files.
$GLOBALS
does not perform a global trick (I cannot access variables $GLOBALS
from different files, am I doing it wrong?); $_SESSION
does it, but that's not what I want. I need to store it in the instant memory of the server, losing it only when the server restarts.
Obviously, the answer is not "database" as the database query will be slower than accessing the array from RAM.
This can be done easily on a Java server, why not on Apache?
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I found a suitable workaround using apc_store ( http://php.net/manual/en/function.apc-store.php ) with time to live = 0. This is not exactly what I need (I think that it still uses serialization), but it's pretty close. Better than memcache.
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