This article explains how to boost the performance of a PHP site by installing a PHP accelerator software.

Why is PHP slow

PHP is an interpreted language that requires to parse the PHP files for each request received by the server. With a compiled language such as Java or Ada, this long and error prone process is done beforehand. Even if the PHP interpretor is optimized, this parsing step can be long. The situation is worse when you use a framework (Symfony, CakePHP,...) that requires many PHP files to be scanned.

eAccelerator to the rescue

eAccelerator is a module that reduces this performance issue by introducing a shared cache for the PHP pre-compiled files. The module somehow compiles the PHP files in some internal compiled state and makes this available to the apache2 processes through a shared memory segment.

Installing eAccelerator

First get eAccelerator sources at http://eaccelerator.net/

Then extract the tar.bz2 file on your server:

$ tar xvjf eaccelerator-0.9.6.1.tar.bz2
eaccelerator-0.9.6.1/
eaccelerator-0.9.6.1/COPYING
...

Build eAccelerator module

Before building the module you must first run the phpize command to prepare the module before compilation:

$ cd eaccelerator-0.9.6.1/
$ phpize

Then, launch the configure script:

$ ./configure --enable-eaccelerator=shared \
    --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config

Finally build the module:

$ make

Install eAccelerator

Installation is done by the next steps:

$ sudo make install

Don't forget to copy the configuration file (have a look at its content but in most cases it works as is):

$ sudo cp eaccelerator.ini  /etc/php5/conf.d/

Restart Apache server

To make the module available, you have to restart the Apache server:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Performance improvements

What performance gain can you expect... That will depend on the PHP software and the page. It's easy to have an idea.

To measure the performance improvement, you can use the Apache benchmarking tool. Do a performance measurement on the web site before the installation and another one after. Be sure to benchmark the same page.

The following command will benchmark the http://mysite.mydomain.com/index.php page 100 times with only one connection.

$ ab -n 100 http://mysite.mydomain.com/index.php

Below is an extract of the percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) for one of my web page served by Dotclear:

         Without        with
        eAccelerator  eAccelerator
 50%       383           236
 66%       384           237
 75%       387           238
 80%       388           239
 90%       393           258
 95%       425           265
 98%       536           295
 99%       796           307
100%       796           307 (longest request)

The gain varies from 38% to 60% so it is quite interesting. The other benefit is that the variance is also smaller meaning that requests are served globally in the same time.