Extra (persistant) tier

Hi, I'm writing a big web application, and trying really hard to seperate business logic and presentation, which been no problem up to now. Because I abstracted the business logic so much the framework became heavier, sometimes a simple action can take up to 2 mb memory and several extra milliseconds. I know this doesn't sound much and I'm applying all kinds of technique's to reduce resource-usage and increase speed. The thing is, I feel like I need to split the business tier up in 2 tiers, one of them being my persisitant object manager. The main reason is because every script that is executed must do some initialization and database calls, and I think I could reduce this by making a persistant tier, but there doesn't seem a good way to do this using php except when I would use sockets. Shared memory doesn't really seem like an option, because I would still need to include all the classes to manage it, and when I use shared memory, the memory would still be copied into the php memory + having a central manager seems like a good idea. I know I'm pretty vague in my requirements, but I think it should be enough to explain what kind of solution I´m looking for, because this seems like a big advantage of java over php, or am I mistaken? If you have any ideas, let me know :) grt, Evert Collab