&#62;This is PHP, though, and you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to remove the IO overhead. At least HipHop uses libevent, so at least apps won't be blocked by slow clients anymore.<p>Really, in PHP you don't have to jump through many hoops at all to minimize disk I/O. Employ APC opcode and user variable caching, build PHP's Memcached (with the 'd' on the end, not the old 'Memcache' lib) into your data layer, and you're good to go.<p>If you're letting any process sit idle, much less a '100-400 MB' one, you're doing it wrong--in any language.