Responding to jpeter1978 at yahoo dot com ... Assuming a character is typically two bytes, the size of a serialized variable (incl array or obj) is 2 * its strlen(). The 44 is 4 more than the 24 + 16 = 40 suggested by php at cytrax dot de plus 4 bytes for worst case 4-byte alignment. So this is probably a reliable formula if you are too lazy to align it using something similar to zeppelinux at comcast dot net as in:
($strlen($serialized_array_or_obj) /4 ) * 4 ) + 40;
The zeppelinux formula would use 20 (for 4-byte integer cpu) or 36 (for 64-bit or 8-byte cpu) for the ending constant so 40 or 44 is probably just achieving header padding but it certainly can't hurt.
