Serialization efficiency

I know that the session module uses serialization code that's platform independent, because it generates human readable output. Question is, why would we want that? Storing server-side information should be as quick as possible, and you rarely care about platform independence. I think that storing binary representations of pval's would be much quicker to both read and write in comparison to the text based serialization we're using now. Using binary serialization may be less suitable for database-based storage, but actually, you can use BLOBs or even VARCHAR's on any decent SQL server. Zeev -- ----------------------------------------------------- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il