Instantiation of class objects

I'm not sure if this is PHP related, or more Zend related, but I'll post it here first. When instantiating new objects, the Zend engine doesn't seem to be caching them. Ie, we run a PHP page which calls new on an object. Then we shutdown the socket and do it again..and again...and again. The times do not decrease (as I would expect with caching) and doing exactly the same functionality WITHOUT using a formal class nets us 100% increase in speed. This is WITH the bware caching - turning it off makes no difference either. That "new" allocater seems heinously expensive. It was my assumption that the Zend engine did garbage collection and would re-use objects in it's cache prior to making expensive memory allocation calls. Bad assumption? TIA! -Szii