Declaring SERVER-WIDE Variables

Greetings, fellow PHP hackers! The current project I'm working on is porting software written in Tango to PHP4. Because these programs heavily rely on information held in (off-site) databases, the tango programs were written to have a set of array variables declared from SQL queries, which then any user hitting the site would have access to. Ie... User 1 hits the webapge.. the server realizes this is the first user and populates the arrays with data from the source database. The page is able to use these arrays. User 2 hits the webpage.. the server already has the arrays packed with data, and user 2 is able to hit the pages quickly, due to no queries being made. All users are this way. Some events would require that these arrays be re-hashed such as when a user updates, inserts or changes the value of an item in the database. These changes. When this update happens, the changes would be made to the server-wide variables, so ANY user on the machine (independant of sessions) would have the fresh data when it next pulls from the arrays. .... Ideally, this would be like settings HTTP_SERVER_VARS[school_array] to contain the data, where every page would have $school_array there without any additional work, and a refresh being a small function that creates the arrays needed and sticks them into HTTP_SERVER_VARS[array_name]. (Along the lines of PHP_SELF, but not dynamic in that sense.) Some of this could be handled with sessions, but my concern is that carrying ALL of this data with each user is a waste of resources, and will require more database calls than needed. If anyone has ANY ideas, PLEASE share them! :) Regards, Michael --- Michael David The Miller Group Web-based software for Schools http://www.miller-group.net