Question

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Cache Object in PHP without using serialize

So I have built a rather large data structure which cannot easily be turned into a relational database format. Using this data structure the requests I make are very fast but it takes about 4-5 seconds to load into memory. What I want is to load it into memory once, then have it sit there and be able to quickly answer individual requests which of course is not the normal flow with the php scripts I have written normally. Is there any good way to do this in php? (again no using a database, it has to use this specialized precomputed structure which takes a long time to load into memory.)

EDIT: This tutorial kind of gives what I want but it is pretty complicated and I was hoping someone would have a more elegant solution. As he says in the tutorial the whole problem is that naturally php is stateless.

Answer 1

You absolutely must do something like what your linked tutorial proposes.

No PHP state persist between requests. This is by design.

Thus you will need some kind of separate long-running process and thus some kind of IPC method, or else you need a better data structure you can load piecemeal.

If you really can’t put this into a relational database (such as sqlite–it doesn’t have to be a process database), explore using some other kind of database, such as a file-based key-value store.

Note that it is extremely unlikely that any long-running process you write, in any language, will be faster, easier, or better than getting this data structure of yours into a real database, relational or otherwise! Get your data structure into a database! It’s the easiest among your possible paths.

Another thing you can do is just make loading your data structure as quick as possible. You can serialize it to a file and then deserialize the file; if that is not fast enough you can try igbinary, which is a much-faster-than-standard-php serializer.