Dolphin 7.1.x and ZendOptimizerPlus

The last release of APC is from 2012.  Plus, APC has known issues with PHP 5.5.  PHP developers have also gone with ZendOptimizerPlus since it moved to open source.  PHP 5.5 ships with ZendOptimizerPlus in the core.  ZendOptimizerPlus also scores higher benchmark results than APC.  The only thing is that ZendOptimizerPlus does not have a user data cache but that is changing with the addition of APCu.  Therefore, I decided to go with ZendOptimizerPlus over APC for the php cache.

Now, in the Dolphin admin, I see for the cache settings, File, Memcache, APC, and XCache.  Now, what does these settings do exactly; what is being cached here outside of the directories /cache and /cache_public?

Here is the deal folks, APC is going bye bye and PHP developers have settled on ZendOptimizerPlus; that is the way things are going to be.

PHP accelerators make PHP run faster, but usually they also provide shared memory API as additional function, so Dolphin use this additional functionality to improve cache speed since cache is stored in memory instead of filesystem.

So if you use ZendOptimizerPlus  you will use it as PHP accelerator only, but for cache you can use Memcached for example.

You can choose where exactly you want to store cache for different things in admin settings.

Thanks Alex.  Is this the same as the user data cache in APC?  If I include the APCu; which adds the user data cache to ZendOptimizerPlus, then if the cache is set to APC, will it work?  Or do you know?

Theoretically you can use ZendOptimizer as PHP accelerator and APC for cache, but in practice it is usually a problem to install two accelerators at the same time.

If you want to stick to  ZendOptimizer which works as PHP accelerator and have internal in memory cache then I would suggest to use it as accelerator and set cache to filesystem, since filesystem cache is stored in regular php files then any php accelerator will improve cache speed as well. 

Are there any benefits of using filesystem cache over memcached? 

 Yes, cache on the filesystem is reduce by the access speed of your drives.

Memcached store the cache web pages in memory the biggest advantage is memory has a much higher access of read/write then  hard drives. This increases site performed by several folds.

Disadvantage is requires additional ram to store the cache pages.


The 

A LOT more ram....... Lets be clear here......

I am going to install ZendOptimizer. Is there anything special I should know? Like configuration.

Yes, you have to add some settings to your php.ini file. You also have to load ZenOptimizerPlus in the php.ini file; when I did this, I got an error message that it was already loaded so I removed the line.  I will pull my config and post it here. 

ZendOptimizerPlus also has a user data cache that has to be added separately, read up on APCu; I was wondering if I install that then set the admin caches to APC?  Does anyone know?

Also, how much ram is a good question because if we are running on a system with limited ram, we might not want to enable a memory cache.

Under the Dynamic Extensions of your php.ini file:

zend_extension=/usr/lib64/php/modules/opcache.so

opcache.memory_consumption=512
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=16
opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.enable_cli=1

Your path to the module may be different; also, if you get a message that the module is already loaded, then remove the line zend_extension=/usr/lib64/php/modules/opcache.so

I don't know what the best settings are, I used those based on some reading.  Also, I don't have a graphic display or any reporting tool to show me anything about what ZendOptimizerPlus is doing.

APC can still be installed but the benchmarks show that ZendOptimizerPlus out performs APC significantly.

ok so I found the repo on github. This quick install doesn't have the actual commands for the command line. Do you have any ideas about the commands to use?

Quick Install
-------------

- Compile

 $PHP_DIR/bin/phpize
 ./configure \
      --with-php-config=$PHP_DIR/bin/php-config
 make

- Install

 make install # this will copy opcache.so into PHP extension directory

- Edit php.ini

 zend_extension=/...full path.../opcache.so

NOTE: In case you are going to use Zend OPcache together with Xdebug or Zend Debugger,
be sure that the debugger is loaded after OPcache. "php -v" must show the debugger
after OPcache.

- Restart PHP

OK, what OS are you running?

Remi Repo has the latest ZendOptimizerPlus all ready to go.  Since I am on CentOS, I installed the Remi Repo and then simply used

yum --enablerepo=remi install php-pecl-zendoptimizerplus

  If you are on a different OS, then you would use a different syntax; such as apt.

Quick Install
-------------

- Compile

 $PHP_DIR/bin/phpize
 ./configure \
      --with-php-config=$PHP_DIR/bin/php-config
 make

- Install

 make install # this will copy opcache.so into PHP extension directory

- Edit php.ini

 zend_extension=/...full path.../opcache.so

NOTE: In case you are going to use Zend OPcache together with Xdebug or Zend Debugger,
be sure that the debugger is loaded after OPcache. "php -v" must show the debugger
after OPcache.

- Restart PHP

What you are doing here is compiling from the binaries.  Do you have the tools installed to do this?  Probably, because I think you mentioned that you are using WHM/cPanel.