Perhaps there is already something for this, but it hasn't jumped out at me and no-one on the coding forum on phpbuilder replied to my thread with anything useful.

What would be nice is for php to have a 'session' of sorts for each UNIX/WINDOWS user who has php files running on the server. Then each user on the machine can have quick memory access to frequently used data.

For example, imagine an online election system. The dates people are allowed to vote are semi-static, they change yearly, but you don't want to monkey with code to change them so they would probably be in the db. On each page hit, you must verify these dates vs the current date to allow access.  This would involve hitting the db to get the dates on each hit.  Having them in memory would be a significant improvement.

I'd imagine an interface similar to the 'session_*' would be suffice.