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Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:30:36 +0200
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Subject: serialize and cache handling
From: phpinternals@thunder-2000.com (Mathias Bank)

Hallo,

I use pear cache (light) to save calculated values. The package uses 
serialize to transform the content of a variable into a writable form. 
This transformed value will be saved to disk.

This could be improved! Would it be possible to rewrite the serialize 
function to make it possible to write directly to disk? If you have a 
value, which needs 10MB you need also ca. 10MB to serialize and than you 
can write this data to disk. So, you needs 20MB. If serialize (and of 
course unserialize) would be able to write directly to disk (or read 
directly from disk), you only needs 10MB.

I think, that could perform much better for every file cache than 
current implementation does. I have such a scenario, in which a variable 
needs 100MB. Because the calculation of this value needs much time, I 
wanted to save this value to cache (with the help of (un)serialize). But 
than, I need 200MB and that doesn't look nice, because it is not really 
necessary.

As I understand the serialize structure, it would be no problem to 
extend it to directly save to disk. But my c knowledge is not as good as 
it should be. I would be very happy, if this idea could be realized.

Mathias