Academic Question RE: Singletons

[rwilkerson]

I'm working on my first PHP application in...years, and I just created a few singletons.  I didn't think too much about it since I understand static members and the like, but in the course of doing some reading I bumped into a very basic question...

 

Since the internet is a stateless environment, what mechanism does PHP use to "persist" the object instantiation across requests?  In other words, how does PHP know that a class has already been instantiated 3 or 4 requests after the instantiation occurred?

 

The question seems fairly academic at the moment (my singletons seem to be working as expected), but a deeper understanding can never be bad...can it?

 

Any insight would be appreciated.

 

Rob Wilkerson

[leonglass]

I think, serialisation aside, that your objects don't persist across requests. Your singleton is created as such per run of the interpreter i.e. each request.

[Daniel0]

In other words, how does PHP know that a class has already been instantiated 3 or 4 requests after the instantiation occurred?

 

It doesn't. It creates a new instance per each request as the script is parsed on each request.