LinuxJedi's /dev/null

I have been asked several times about why I choose APC over any other PHP opcode cache for our site. There are several around nowadays, the big open source ones being eAccelerator, APC and XCache. I am a big advocate of open source and I'm much more likely to get upper management to agree to free software than an expensive alternative from Zend. As far as speed difference goes there isn't a great deal of difference between them, I could make code optimisations that would give us a better performance increase.

First I had to admit it was not my first choice, we were using eAccelerator to start with, but we were then developing problems that were killing Apache processes. After a bit of research I found this was a known problem with no real fix (it may be fixed now, to be honest I haven't looked back). It was decided that we needed to evaluate the alternatives to eAccelerator as soon as possible.

I had a brief look at XCache and have no doubt it is a great project, but at the time it was still in its infancy. This would have been the last solution evaluated simply because we prefer software that is well established.

APC is well established and since it was announced that this would be included in PHP6 it has been stabilised very well. We tested it to death and it responded well, within a few days it was across our whole hosting platform.