PHP Accelerator

[enry]

I installed a PHP Accelerator on the webserver. People have claimed speed increases of up to 400%. Of course I don't believe it, so I'll leave it up to you peeps to decide. Test it over the next few days and let me know.
(nana)

[t3ase]

oOoOoOOOooo

[RAAZ227]

I notice a difference

[Vulcanon]

me too, it's much faster now

[MSP4EVER]

Yeah is alot faster

[tekkie]

I also see a difference, usually at work the site is pretty slow but it seems to appear much faster now.

Shoot me a PM with the software you are running, I think this may help our intranet out at work ;)

Sort of off topic but I am really digging the new site, I did not like it at first but now I see all the other features and think its sweet. Good Job(yes)

[FuriousMojo]

I'd also like to see the accelerator. I'll respond as well with my opinions after surfing the site a bit more.

[enry]

http://apc.communityconnect.com/
It works, but does not seem like totally enterprise level stuff. But, it is open source. The dancing banana likes open source. (group)

I will recompile to remove the stupid apc_notice message in stderr (apache error log), it's quite annoying!

[shinzen]

props- much faster to browse!

[turbo_p5]

i also agree, alot better! i could only hope my car is as fast as this site!

[FuriousMojo]

I notice a small improvement. Not bad!

[computerGeek]

I thought that Vbulliten was 90% MySQL. I am running a server now and unfortunaletly i have not been at this board long enough to notice a change. I read over the about it page and it seems somewaht usefull for boards mainly, because people mainly choose the forums and once that is run it keeps it in cache so it just displays it already compiled as if you where opening a page you have already visited. like your IE cache!

Iteresting, how hard was it to install, I am running a huge shopping cart and forum and i think i am y be interested in this!! Anyone else try it, anyone else notice a change on there servers?!!?!?!?!

-vin

[enry]

VBulletin is pretty mysql intensive, but there's also a truckload of php.

If you want it to run properly, you will need RAM, and LOTS of it. This server is a dual xeon and with 1 GB ram it would occasionally cough. Phys mem usage was 100% almost, and sometimes MySQL would go bananas (hundreds of connections, etc...) even though swap usage was almost NIL. We dropped in an extra gig, and now phys mem usage is about 1.5 gigs, but the server has not hiccuped since. The conclusion is that if your DB is very large (ours is in the gigs) then disk access is what kills the system, and mysql knows that, and tries to save you by loading everything into memory.

The PHP accelerator I installed does not cache the output of the scripts. It caches the "compiled" version of the script. The script still needs to execute, but the parsing and compiling phases are skipped. This is useful for VB since there's quite a few levels of includes in any given file. The installation is trivial, if you're familiar with building and installing unix software manually.

[ChopstickHero]

sounds good.
definite improvement.

(nana)

[computerGeek]

Guess what i am installing this week!!!!!!
-vin


VBulletin is pretty mysql intensive, but there's also a truckload of php.

If you want it to run properly, you will need RAM, and LOTS of it. This server is a dual xeon and with 1 GB ram it would occasionally cough. Phys mem usage was 100% almost, and sometimes MySQL would go bananas (hundreds of connections, etc...) even though swap usage was almost NIL. We dropped in an extra gig, and now phys mem usage is about 1.5 gigs, but the server has not hiccuped since. The conclusion is that if your DB is very large (ours is in the gigs) then disk access is what kills the system, and mysql knows that, and tries to save you by loading everything into memory.

The PHP accelerator I installed does not cache the output of the scripts. It caches the "compiled" version of the script. The script still needs to execute, but the parsing and compiling phases are skipped. This is useful for VB since there's quite a few levels of includes in any given file. The installation is trivial, if you're familiar with building and installing unix software manually.

[Kooldino]

APC? That's ricer stuff.

[gino]

Not sure, Antoine, if 400% is correct, but 0-60 times have improved vastly!

[enry]

I set Timeout to 300, KeepAliveTimeout to 15, and boosted ServerLimit to 200.

[Togan]

yup there is big difference

[BlueMonsta]

where can i find this php accelerator
the company i work for can use this

[enry]

http://apc.communityconnect.com/

WHAT IS APC?
APC is the Alternative PHP Cache. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for compiling and caching php scripts.

APC was conceived of to provide a way of boosting the performance of PHP on heavily loaded sites by providing a way for scripts to be cached in a compiled state, so that the overhead of parsing and compiling can be almost completely eliminated. There are commercial products which provide this functionality, but they are neither open-source nor free. Our goal was to level the playing field by providing an implementation that allows greater flexibility and is universally accessible.

We also wanted the cache to provide visibility into it's own workings and those of PHP, so time was invested in providing internal diagnostic tools which allow for cache diagnostics and maintenance.

Thus arrived APC. Since we were committed to developing a product which can easily grow with new version of PHP, we implemented it as a zend extension, allowing it to either be compiled into PHP or added post facto as a drop in module. As with PHP, it is available completely free for commercial and non-commercial use, under the same terms as PHP itself.

APC has been tested under PHP 4.0.3, 4.0.3pl1 and 4.0.4. It currently compiles under Linux and FreeBSD. Patches for ports to other OSs/ PHP versions are welcome.

[BlueMonsta]

Thanks... my boss is taking look at it right now.

I'm not a bad coop student =) still room to improve though

[r1ceburner]

Have you looked at Zend's PHP Accelerator. I've used it for some smaller, but computationally intensive projects and it was pretty good. APC didn't exist back then, but Zend worked well for me.

I've also been playing with the early versions of MySQL 5.0 and the new database engine IS MUCH MORE BEHAVED under heavy loads. It even offers stored procedures, which would probably save you some PHP execution time.

[enry]

I think Zend PHP Accelerator = $$$$$

Can't wait for MySQL5, I want SP's and all that fun stuff.

[r1ceburner]

Yeah, the early MySQL 5 beta that I've been testing is wicked fast, but it likes a bit memory... I'm sure the memory footprint will come down with the release version because all of the debug information won't need to be stored in RAM.

It's about time to start on another PHP project myself. Since I'm a registered Zend developer, I'll see if I can snag and eval copy of the accelerator. They used to offer a 30 day trial for it, too... I'm interested to benchmark it against APC.