The fastest way to save/restore PHP application state

Hi folks, Could you please recommend the fastest way to save/restore a state of a PHP application? Looks like the igbinary extension is a possible way to go. Are there any faster, possibly even more low level ways? For example, in C/C++ it's possible to save/restore POD structs as binary data very efficiently. Is there anything similar possible with PHP? I'm developing a game application where PHP is running on a server and a client sends small game world changes every several seconds. That's why It's critical for me to restore and save the state of the application as fast as possible. Running PHP as a daemon is not an option for me. Thanks in advance! -- Best regards, Pavel