I've recently installed eAccelerator on the web server that hosts this site and I wanted to share some of my impressions after a few days.
- What does it do? Nobody put it better than the eAccelerator team itself: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times."
- Does it work? Hell yes. beerpla.net loads on average twice as fast as before. The results are consistent, so I'm very impressed.
- Ease of installation. Extremely easy. Compilation from source tarball, adding a few lines into php.ini, and apache restart is all it takes. Full instructions here.
- Feedback from companies who have installed eAccelerator is here. It's hosted by eAccelerator themselves but seems to be legit.
/End of short note
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.