I’m the main author of Cache_Lite.

Just have a look at the Cache_Lite tutorial :

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.caching.cache-lite.intro.php

At the end of this page, there is a section “very important comment”. If you modify your code as it’s described in it, perfs of PEAR/Cache/Lite will be (often) more than twice better PEAR/Cache.

The main reason is that Cache/Lite load the PEAR.php file only when an error occured (the loading process is dynamic). And PEAR.php is a big file…