currently looking into upgrading the HTDB parsing engine to use a bastardization of expat so as to make the parsed language XML-ish, as that's what everyone expects these days... (or should i use zend?)
(later that evening...)
huzzah! it isn't everyday that you find a 40% speed increase in your software, but tonight i did just that! i was able to increase the page delivery throughput by nearly 2x using a new implementation of the file parser. now this beast's really in a position to swap-out the language engine with something better...