On my dev server, I updated PHP to version 5.5.2. This included switching from APC to Zend Opcache. I’m instinctively wary of anything with the name Zend attached. I’m also quite fond of APC, with its high performance, relative stability, compatibility with the various code obfuscators, and arbitrary object storage. APC had been slated for official inclusion in the PHP distribution for 5.4, but that didn’t work out, and PHP 5.5 included Zend instead.

Why?

Apparently there’s a 3 – 5% performance improvement going from APC to Zend. I haven’t tested it on my sites, in my environment. Assuming that it is faster, it still doesn’t have persistent object storage.

The Zend documentation goes on at length about how APC releases lagged behind PHP releases–a problem I never encountered; a point which is completely invalid if it gets merged. The rhetoric is annoying and disingenuous and I suspect that there’s as much ego involved as anything else.

Zend Opcache will probably end up with some kind of APC-style persistent object storage, eventually. I plan to continue using PHP 5.4 with APC for my sites until that happens. I might change my mind if benchmarks show a definite performance improvement, but I might not.