Posted by Rasmus Lerdorf on 01/06/05 02:48

Richard Lynch wrote:
> Or you could pay a guy who knows C and PHP to do it in, what, a couple
> hours? Depends on how confusing your arrays are, and how heterogeneous
> they are, I guess.
>
> Once you do that, all your data is in PHP/Apache when it launches, and
> it's always available to your PHP script all the time. Sweet.

Anything you do in the MINIT hook is basically free, so it would be
trivial to load the data for the array from somewhere. Like a database,
an xml file, etc. So you wouldn't need to hardcode a complex array
structure in your MINIT hook, just have this generic little extension
that creates an array (or object) from some external source. To change
the data you would change that external source and restart your server,
or you could write a PHP function in your extension that forced a reload
with the caveat that each running httpd process would need to have that
function be called since your array/object lives in each process separately.

If you ask really nicely one of the folks on the pecl-dev list might
just write this thing for you. Especially if you spec it out nicely and
think through how it should work.

-Rasmus

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