Persistant variables in PHP?

Is there any built-in method of making variables persistant across all sessions and users? ie like session variables except global to all users? This isn't overly hard to add myself but I'd like to have it handled automaticlly the way sessions are. For a stupid example I could: --- persistant ( "hit_counter" ); session_register ( "user_hits" ); $hit_counter++; $user_hits++; print "This page has been viewed $hit_counter times, $user_hits by you."; --- Also any reason why objects don't work w/ sessions? Writing my own serializer/unserializer that did handle them was trivial. I can't imagine why it'd be so much harder to code the same thing into the built-in serializer. Thanks. :)