PHP 4.0.x Persistent flag in memory management.

Could anyone explain me briefly the idea of "persistent memory blocks" ? What result can I expect, when I always set it to 0 ? And what is the purpose of such flag in hash tables ? For example, the function zend_hash_destroy(HashTable *ht) uses functions pefree, and this (I found it after turning off so called ZEND_FAST_CACHE) has VERY bad infuence on memory usage patterns. Sometimes it happens, that destroying hash table causes DIRECT and immediate deallocation of blocks, which were previously allocated in function 'start_memory_manager' (in 'for' loop, which initialises memory cache). In my opinion those blocks should stay untouched until the execution of 'shutdown_memory_manager' function. Now we haven't even a base control on order of allocationg and freeing memory blocks. Zend, may be you would be so kind and explain me a bit ? This problem is of course related to the 'PHP holds memory too long', but I changed a title to make people interested in again... Filip Sielimowicz I would be VERY grateful for any response.