You are correct, the shared memory structure is for performance reasons. It is for an application that I expect to be accessed often. The queries against the database are complex and will probably overload the database server so much that the required performance will not be met with a database alone.

Your GDBM idea sounds good enough, as long as the OS can be made to share the cache among all of the processes. Will the GDBM tied hash be automatically shared (through the OS), or does that need to be shared using shared memory? Or does this method require that each process have a separate tied hash?