I know a lot of people use smarty or other templating systems.  It makes sense, and separates design from the

programming

  logic.  But i still use includes and am proud! Anyone else in the include boat?

include_once 'indextop.html'; //WIN!!

Wrote my own from the ground up. It's all include based, although I'm a require and require_once kinda guy.

Using APC with a require-type structure as well as lotsa classes makes GOOD SENSE.

Still not got APC workin yet perk, my host uses zend and its incompatible, not sure if i should request zend be removed so i can use apc or not

Well, Zend costs AFAIK and APC is free... but I don't think that, unless you're in a VPS they can allocated <> space to *you* and the

PHP

  instance attached to

Apache

  and not everyone else... if they go that direction and you're shared I think it'd be trouble for them... and someone like me'd take rather large advantage of it pretty quickly

Have you thought about either a colo, dedi or vps for your stuff?

im on vps now and its handling everything pretty well
in fact ive almost finished rewriting the site and its a million times faster, and found other ways to cache stuff... i.e. by having interim tables with pre-calculated data for the big pages

If it's a VPS then you should be able to get Zend out of there no worries... do you have root level access to the VPS? You could probably do it yourself, although I do not know how. If you get that far and want assistance getting APC on the box lemmee know.