As we all know, if an object is serialised, then the class definition must be included _before_ it is unserialised.
My framework has an enormous number of class files, and including them all at the beginning of the script was really taking it's toll on my system (memory and execution time) so I switched to including required classes at the top of each class file that used them using require_once.
This caused problems because I start my session at the very beginning of my script's execution, but all my class files aren't there at the beginning!!
So no in my special 'require' function, I do the following:
if(!class_exists($to_require))
{
session_write_close();
require_once('path/to/classes/'.$to_require.'.php');
session_start();
}
This is a considerably smaller performance hit that including every class that the application uses at the very beginning of the application.
