Ilia Alshanetsky has a quick new post today with information about a PECL package he's worked up to provide PHP with access to the "native hash tables found in libC".

lchash is a little PHP extension that you can find at http://pecl.php.net/package/lchash which provides means of accessing and using native hash tables found in libC. The interface is really simple involving just 4 functions:

• lchash_create() - initialize a new hash table
• lchash_destroy() - destroy a hash table
• lchash_insert() - insert key/value pair into the hash
• lchash_find() - retrieve a values based on key

That last bit definitely sounds promising - anything that can help speed up the store of memory in a script is worth investigating to me...