COM, DLL

I have this problem. I am running a php application , that calls a dll, through COM ($obj=new COM("foo.dll"), and this works fine. My problem is that each time i call from a php a function from this dll, the dll initialiazes again, which happens to be very time consuming because it reads a lot of data from a database. My question is if there is a way (other than converting the dll into an .exe and a window service), to keep the dll in memory, keeping all their global variables set between calls from php.