After a long time, today i came across (again) the Minutes Php Developers Meeting , now seen of course, on the light of new knowledge i’ve accumulated since ( not a lot , but some ).
On the list of discussed/accepted/declined matters, that i just re-read, what hit my attention was the decision made to add an opcode cache (APC) to the std distribution. I think it is going to be very interesting and practical.
APC is a well-written, well-maintained Pecl package. I have implemented already in a couple of solutions, and it is definitely worth the trouble of setting it up.
Another thing was the merging of the Hardened-PHP patch into the std distro, and a few other measures, as follows.