I have a few big arrays stored in separate files that are included into PHP as and when they are required:Array File:<?php $cty_arr[af] = Afghanistan; $cty_arr[ax] = land Islands; $cty_arr[al] = Albania; $cty_arr[dz] = Algeria; $cty_arr[as] = American Samoa;...?>Main Script:<?php require(/var/www/include/array_file.php);...?>I am not very sure how PHP utilizes memory, but I have this thought that some RAM is allocated to store the big array for each instance that the script is run. Since these arrays are static, could there be a better way of loading such arrays to achieve some memory savings?
What is the most memory efficient way to load big arrays into PHP script?
php;memory management
I thought about this again. My comments are still valid, so including it in a php file is the cheapest way to get the array into your system and without a shared memory you will not reduce the total memory usage.But maybe you can optimize it at an higher level of abstraction. Assuming that you always only need some countries/settings/localization in your loaded page and never all, you could split this array into multiple files.<?php...function countryCodeToName($key){    if (isset($this->countries[$key])) return $this->countries[$key];    $firstCharacter=$key[0]    include country_.$firstCharacter..php; //similar to your file above    $this->countries=$this->countries + $cty_arr;    //some handling if still missing     //and return ...}