Web server performance: Use PHP accelerator
Web server performance is a major hurdle in any web application performance. Apache web server is a great web server to serve static and dynamic pages. Combined with PHP, it becomes a winning combination, powering millions of websites around the globe.
As PHP pages are compiled than executed for each and every request, it consumes a significant amount of processor time for busy websites, thus creating a bottleneck. If processor is busy it will reduce server’s capacity to server more web requests per second.
Removing bottleneck
The solution to the issue is to use OPCode caching on web server. This saves the parsing, compilation time and a lot of I/O on each and every request.
There are a lot of accelerators available to fulfill need of performance hungry applications. Famous php accelerators include
- eAccelerator: Free, open source and great tool to improve performance. Covered in more depth in my post Installing eAccelerator
- Alternative PHP Cache: Open source, will become built in PHP 6
- ionCube PHP Accelerator: Born in 2001, only supports PHP 4
- Xcache: fast, stable and relatively new.
- Nusphere PhpExpress: Free, available for windows as well
- Zend Optimizer+: By Zend, part of Zend Server
- Windows Cache Extension for PHP: Free, open source by Microsoft for PHP under Windows
We will look into the above listed accelerators in depth, in series of post dedicated to each of them, starting with eAccelerator. Please see my post Using eAccelerator, the post includes details, performance impact and how to install.
