[PHPwestoz] Opcode caches

[Adam Ashley]

> 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.
> 

In my experience the instability introduced by these products is not
even remotely close to being worth the speed increases. A lot of the
improvements they claim to do can be managed with code design and
loading schemes. One of the most common mistakes I've seen that lead to
using these is loading all the source code on every execution of every
page.

Also towards speeding stuff up one zend extension I have found to be
useful is http://xdebug.org/ 

version 2 gives good back traces with all errors (even when a fatal
error occurs, which a php coded error handler cant do) but best of all
generates call traces which are compatible with valgrind and can be
loaded with kvalgrind for visulisation purposes.

As its a zend module it can give you timing info about every function
call executed in teh scripts from the method calls on your custom php
objects right down to the low level system calls. Very very very useful
for optimising that long running script, or often run script.

Adam