In a new posting on Harry Fuecks' weblog on SitePoint, he calls attention to an old favorite in the world of PHP caching technologies - Turck MMCache.

Turck MMCache is a free open source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache for PHP. It increases performance of PHP scripts by caching them in compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated.

Last time I looked at it was back in the beginning of 2003, when I needed an accelerator for a Windows server running PHP. Since then it's come on along way and now offers what it calls a "dynamic content cache" which is what got me interested again.

In his opinion (and a few others in the comments, apparently), the Truck MMCache is only getting better and is something to harass your host for... [of course you're not going to get the shared memory access on a shared host].