The first thing I noticed is that because my session files now live inside my user space, as opposed to the system /tmp folder, they are exempt from the server's garbage collection process. Think about it. This has been a continual nuisance for years, at every web hosts I've been with. Now, if I specify that a session should last twenty four hours, it does exactly that! As opposed to fifteen minutes or thereabouts, as before. This alone has made the switch to phpsuexec worthwhile. It's tempting to think that this whole phpsuexec business is some Gestapo effort by your host to clamp down on "bad" users, it's not. It's simply a means to managing better, more robust web servers. If I have some script that is out of control and eating server resources, I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT! With php running as an Apache module, there is simply no way to do this. More importantly, if some other website on my shared server has a script that is out of control, I WANT IT FIXED! There's no reason why a hundred web sites should have to suffer for one user's wonky code. In our case, it turns out that one of the hosts' server tools was eating up most of the extra resources, and this change has enabled them to locate and crucially, FIX the source of the trouble. There were a couple of users with dodgy scripts too, by the way. There are other advantages, too. Mail now comes from my user account as opposed to "nobody..", which is nice, and this fine-grained control over php directives that couldn't previously be manipulated has opened up a whole lot of possibilities.

Have you ever want to draw a windmill, and after that animate it? No problem!