Be warned that if you try to shmop_open with a key set to zero, shmop_open will seemingly work, and you can write to it, but you will not be able to read from it or delete it. If you're not careful, you can continue doing this - creating more and more shared memory blocks at "zero" until eventually you WILL start getting errors saying that php can't access or create the shared memory block, and you will have to restart your machine to free up all of those "zero" blocks.