Eliminating CLI overhead

I intend to run a lot of PHP scripts, all the time, on a Linux machine. The scripts were designed for CLI environment, since they will handle the entire management of the machine, being started by init and then effectively and completely taking over. I'm wondering whether starting up the PHP interpreter for every script hurts performance, if there's anything I can do about it, and if possible, would the potential gain be noticeable? We're talking a machine in the range of 1 GHz CPU speed, with IDE disk drives. I've already considered all kinds of Linux-specific "tricks", I'm interested in the pure PHP aspect of the issue. -- Skippy - Romanian Web Developers - http://ROWD.ORG