see: drupal. having to execute the whole application from the entry point on every page hit is just awful. APC will only save you the loading from the disk and

see: drupal. having to execute the whole application from the entry point on every page hit is just awful. APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part, not the whole execution chain. with node and others the application is just sitting there, listening to a port, and fires the right callbacks when a request comes in. the application startup cost is paid once. not on every request. there are people who have tried to reproduce it in php by having php running and serving multiple requests in a similar manner. This is really treacherous since php didn't even pretend to free memory under any circumstances ever, until about php 5.3. since moving over to writing servers, i just feel that the php model of executing the script when a url is hit is just fundamentally wrong.