PHP 5.5 + Zend Opcache

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?

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. . . and we’re back.

There are still more things I need to do, (memtest, adjust clock speeds, remove drives after sync, probably some stuff I’m forgetting) but I am not going to intentionally take sites off-line again until I have the previous system working again so I can switch over without incurring downtime. NO MORE DOWNTIME.

New Years’ Resolution for 2013? 99.9% uptime. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again. It’s just a matter of not failing to think.

Next up: I’ve finished reading Games People Play and will be blogging about it. However, I’ll be adding a large section to the wiki before doing so.

There’s still basically nobody reading this, so ok sure fine whatever. (Which reminds me, I need to get Subversion up and running again. So much to do!)

Until next time.

More meaningful benchmarks on APC

The site I benchmarked the other day is a Dokuwiki site, wiki.naptastic.com. I discovered today that it’s possible to totally disable caching for Dokuwiki. The first thing I wanted to establish was whether disabling caching in the configuration file was enough to make it ineffective, or if the cache had to be cleared out afterward. (The site seemed suspiciously responsive after I changed the configuration.) My thinking is that turning off caching would make for a more meaningful test, since each PHP process would have to do so much more than just fetching and serving a file: it now has to parse and process a bunch of stuff.

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