I'm currently working with an Apache/mod_perl Maypole-based web application that depends upon a fairly complex set of configuration directives.

These settings are currently stored in a number of XML files. I'm parsing them with XML simple and turning the resulting data structure over to the web application.

What I need is a more efficient (i.e. faster, less memory & hopefully less processor-intensive) way to store and serialize this data and cache it for the rest of the of the Apache children to read from (so that Apache child processes don't have to re-read the configuration every time they start).

Whatever format the configuration is stored in needs to be fairly easily read for my configuration application so that I can edit it as need be. Basically what we have here is a large configuration engine that understands the configuration data structure and causes the web application to act accordingly. Think a much smaller implementation of Siebel for Perl.

I'm looking for your suggestions for a fast (i.e. very fast) ways to store and read a complex configuration. I guess I'm essentially dependant upon some sort of serialization process that will convert my data structure in memory to disk so that I can read it back later.

As mentioned above I'd ideally like to do this in a much more efficient way than I am now (with my configuration in XML files and the data being converted to a HASH via XML::Simple).

Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Matt