The idea behind SHMOP is an easy to use shared memory interface,
without any additional headers added to the shared memory segment
or requiring any special special controls to access the shared memory
segment outside of PHP. SHMOP borrows its api from C's api to shm,
which makes it very easy to use, because it treats shared memory, like C, as
a file of sorts. This makes it very easy to use even for novices, due to this
functionality. Most importantly SHMOP uses shm segments to store raw data,
which means you don't need to worry about matching headers, etc... when you are
using C, perl or other programming languages to open/create/read/write shm segments
that were create or are going to be used by PHP. In this it differs from
sysvshm, who's shm interface uses a specialized header, which resides inside
the shared memory segment this adds an unnecessary level of difficulty when
you want to access php shm from external programs.
Also, from my personal tests in Linux 2.2/2.4 and FreeBSD 3.3 SHMOP is about
20% faster then sysvshm, mostly due to fact it does not need to parse the
specialized header and stores the data in raw form.