mod_php4 question...

I posted a previous message that, I must admit, was probably not that well thought out. I've looked a little further and I'm getting a better feel for what is going on, but I was wondering if someone in the know would be able to clarify. I'm using php with Apache. When I truss a simple file, I see the majority of the system calls in stat calls. It tracks down to a getcwd ( defined with VCWD_GETCWD ), which seems to do alot of I/O on solaris. Given that on a heavily loaded box, avoid that much I/O ( especially if it is just checking the same filepath that was checked previously), seems wasteful and can lead to high I/O waits. The call stack is something along the lines of: 1 send_php 2 zend_execute_scripts 3 zend_compile_file 4 complie_file 5 open_file_for_scanning 6 zend_fopen 7 php_fopen_wrapper_for_zend 8 php_fopen_wrapper 9 php_fopen_url_wrapper 10 php_fopen_with_path 11 php_fopen_and_set_opened_path 12 expand_filepath 13 vcwd_getcwd It seems to me that the path is available from apache ( either through the request structure or as part of the filename ). My question is, what would be the harm in doing something like have mod_php4.c open the file and set file_handle->handle.fp and close it ( or some other mechanism from having to call the whole php_fopen_and_set_opened_path ) to avoid the getcwd? Any thoughts? I'll do some more testing, but I wanted to get some expert feedback before I went too far down the wrong path. Thanks Andy