A great article posted on 2bits regarding the use of PHP accelerators: PHP op-code caches / accelerators: Drupal large site case study.  While the article uses Drupal for the case study, the use of PHP op-code caches/accelerators such as eAccelerator and APC should benefit any PHP-based application on the server.

For a large Drupal site, one of the biggest performance boosts one can do is to install an op-code cache/accelerator. PHP op-code caches / Accelerators Since PHP is an interpreted language, every page access has to load the script, parse it, compile it into op-codes, then execute it. This load/parse/compile cycle can add up to a lot of processing time, specially when you have lots of page accesses.  Op-code caches/accelerators eliminate this load/parse/compile time, by doing so once, and keeping the compiled version of the script in memory (or disk) and use it next time a page requests this script.

You'll want to especially take a look in the article at the CPU and memory usage comparisons between using and not using op-code caching.  The writer also hints that eAccelerator may use less CPU and memory usage than APC.  I personally like eAccelerator over APC, but either one is a must have if you run your site on a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server.  I run CMS Report using eAccelerator on a VPS I manage through Dakota Hosting.

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