at startup. This caches the manifest, so that on first access to a phar archive, no file manifest parsing occurs.
This could use further tweaking. For instance, the full copy of the manifest into the current process may be unnecessary if refcounting could be external
to the manifest. This would be another significant gain. With APC, I measure a slight perf increase to 19 req/sec up from 16 req/sec, without it approaches
regular PHP at 3.8 req/sec (regular is 4 req/sec). This is benching phpMyAdmin