Boost your Website with APC

Thursday, November 17. 2005

Two weeks ago I plugged APC onto my main customers site, and I'm really satisfied by it now. I already tried it some time ago, but back then it had some problems with PEARs Quickforms and similiar heavy OO code, but those problems are fixed for about 90% now, some 8% can be easily fixed by reordering require statements and the like and finally the remaining ~2% are going to be fixed by Rasmus in the foreseeable future.

Note that I'm using APC with Debians PHP-4.3.10 and Apache2 package, which proofs a lot IMO and there shouldn't be much that hinders you from trying it too!

Here's a very simple instruction to boost your PHP enabled webserver:

~$ pear download pecl/apc
~$ tar xzf APC-3.0.8.tgz
~$ rm -f package.xml
~$ cd APC-3.0.8
~/APC-3.0.8$ /usr/bin/phpize
~/APC-3.0.8$ ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config \
    --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap
~/APC-3.0.8$ make all
~/APC-3.0.8$ sudo make install

APC is now installed somewhere in /usr/lib/php.

Some lines to add to php.ini:

extension=apc.so

[apc]
apc.enabled = 1
apc.cache_by_default = 1
apc.shm_size = 32
apc.num_files_hint = 500
apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc.XXXXXX

If you want to cache only a certain virtual host, set apc.cache_by_default to 0 in php.ini and add the respective php_admin_value to your <VirtualHost> directive for the vhost.

The package also contains a useful status script, just copy the shipped apc.php to your document root. You'll see how the usage of the SHM segment grows by time, and after some time you'll also see what settings to use for apc.num_files_hint and apc.shm_size when the whole site is cached.

Sean recently added some APC docs, too!

Quod est demonstrandum, Website boosted!

Posted by Mike in PHP at 18:37 | Comments (9) | Trackback (1)

Comments

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Is there an equivalent open source package to Zend Cache? As far as I can tell none of the open source caches cache the output like Zend Cache does, only the bytecode. On one of our projects we used to run Zend Cache but it was too expensive so we didn't renew the license. As a replacement I'm implementing APC for bytecode caching and PEAR::Cache_Lite for output caching, which works well although requires more effort to implement. I suppose if you do it smart you could implement Cache_Lite in a auto_prepend and auto_append file.

#1 Luke van Blerk (Link) on 2005-11-17 20:49 (Reply)

I'm also having problems with heavy OOP code. What exactly did you do to fix that? You mention something about re-ordering require statements, how did you do this exactly?

I agree with you on that it is a very good package. I wish I could use it already!

#2 Evert Pot (Link) on 2005-11-17 22:05 (Reply)

You can see the changes to the file APC had problems with there: http://dev.iworks.at/apc.diff

It basically is an attempt to reorder the includes similiarily to another page with nearly the same includes that worked without problems.

HTH

#2.1 Mike on 2005-11-17 22:22 (Reply)

So basically you are not requiring from within other classes?

Thnx,

#3 Evert Pot (Link) on 2005-11-17 23:17 (Reply)

No...

I do require_once within class methods several times.

I can hardly explain, but it's about early binding. There are problems when APC encounters inheritance done by early binding on one page while it was done by late binding on another one.

#3.1 Mike on 2005-11-17 23:26 (Reply)

Evert what version of PHP you running?

You guys got any comment on a Zend Cache alternative?

#4 Luke van Blerk (Link) on 2005-11-18 05:50 (Reply)

Im running 5.0.5.

I think apc has some good methods to implement a good shared-memory based cache engine. I wrote a small thing for this, but I was unable to test it so far.

#4.1 Evert (Link) on 2005-11-18 07:25 (Reply)

Sorry, I was not able to use !ZendCache, but look at [http://docs.php.net/en/function.apc-store.html apc_store]()

#4.2 Mike on 2005-11-18 09:10 (Reply)

Thanks, do you think apc will have performance benefits over Cache_Lite?

#4.2.1 Luke van Blerk on 2005-11-18 09:22 (Reply)

Yes! especially if you use SHM, but you'll need a lotta RAM then

-- anyway even file backed MMAP should be a lot faster than Cache_Lites file fiddling.

#4.2.1.1 Mike on 2005-11-18 09:24 (Reply)

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