Tim Flight

This might go over the head of many of my regular readers. However I always like giving thanks (and a few links) to software that helps me do my job…. especially open source software.

A few months ago I installed eAccelerator on my Xserve. eAccelerator is a program which basically compiles and caches PHP scripts so they run faster. I was a bit skeptical of its claims but decided to give it a try.

A painless trip through the familiar unix commands configure, make, make install had the program compiled on Mac OS X. I Add a few lines to the PHP.ini file then reloaded Apache. All was good and what a huge difference it made.

One of the sites I host was initially created from the PostNuke CMS program. Like many CMS programs it is very PHP and MySQL intensive. Once the majority of the scripts were cached (only took a few minutes) the site began to load substantially faster than before.

eAccelerator has a former life as a product called Tuck MMCache which is no longer being actively developed. There are benchmark results that show the product as being faster than many commercially available products. I believe them to be true.

Almost all of the sites I develop use PHP and MySQL, most often so clients can update their own websites through custom interfaces I develop. eAccelerator makes the pages load as fast as many static pages. I’ve increased the amount of RAM in my Xserve and allocated a good chunk of memory to eAccelerator so that more scripts can be cached. eAccelerator currently has over one thousand PHP scripts cached on my server stored in 58MB of RAM.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.