[PHPwestoz] Opcode caches

[Evan Barter]

Hi everyone.

I don't know how much experience you guys have had in building 
sites/applications where speed and load minimalizing is absolutely 
critical, but I've had a bit. If you haven't, surely you've heard of 
Zend's Accelerator and/or Performance Suite. Basically, whenever a PHP 
script is run, it is first compiled before it is executed. This 
compilation will happen on every load of the script, in the absence of a 
cache.

Now, there was a time, once, where there were numerous caches available. 
Off the top of my head I can think of turck-mmcache, APC, afterBURNER 
and Zend's Accelerator (ZA). Nowadays, the choice is much more limited. 
APC and afterBURNER haven't been updated in ~6 months and ~2 years 
respectively. turck-mmcache is now a dead project as the original 
developer was lured to Zend. This pretty much left us with ZA.

The thing about ZA is it's a commercial product, costing US$490 and thus 
putting it out of reach of the majority of PHP users. Now, I don't have 
a problem with Zend making money off of it's products but I draw the 
line at crippling (okay, maybe that's_slightly_melodramatic) PHP in 
order to make a buck. I don't see why such a feature isn't a part of PHP 
in the first place and it really pisses me off that they've left 
inefficiencies in the language in order to turn a profit.

But, this isn't going to be an entire bitchfestatZend post. There is a 
chance of salvation for us who don't have hundreds of dollars to throw 
around. mmcache was a very good project before it was abandoned. Some 
new developers decided rather than letting the previous good work go to 
waste, they'd pick up where the original dev left off (bless open 
source). The new project is called eAccelerator (sf page: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eaccelerator) and it's being actively 
developed.

So this is a call to arms. There are binaries for all PHP versions 
available at http://www.arnot.info/eaccelerator/. I'd love to see some 
of the PHPwestozians helping out, reporting bugs, making suggestions and 
such. At the very least, give it a shot.

Cheers,
Evan