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PHP Cachers like Eaccelerator, Xcache, APC are really worthy to give a try. For highly loaded server with around 10+ load constantly, and running php as the major scripting, then definitely a cacher can lowers the load to 1-2. I usually do lots of proxy hosting on one of my server. From last month i was having over 10 load constantly on the server. Usually it covers up the 30-40 Though, having it highly optimized, i hardly face any sort of speed or crashing problem. Though the response time for that server was around .05 seconds per KB, which is slow comparing with other web proxies in the world. One of my made a complaint on this issue that the loading time is comparatively slow and needs to be fixed asap. In the meantime i was running php with CGI instead of Apache to make it more secure and perfect. Though today i made the change from Cgi to apache, so that i can use Eaccelerator. The major reason of choosing eaccelerator is it was installed previously though it wasn’t working as it doesn’t support threaded mode. I knew that Xcache is better than eaccelerator, but before installing xcache, i was waiting for a test with a php cacher. And voila, after the move, i can see my load lowers to only 2-7 now which was around 50-75 few minutes ago. Though, i have made some changes to take it effect, as i got 6 GB RAM on that server, so i made shm size to 256 MB. Caches work from hard drive, though it needs some extra RAM allocation to work with the transition, thats why most of the cases, people love to keep the shm size lower. Finally i found it is caching around 4000 scripts in the server and made the sites more faster keeping the load lower.

Note: When you have around 40-50 load active, then its better to kill all the http connections and then wait for having the load lower than 5. After that start the apache, it will start caching your php scripts. After a few minutes, you should see your load is not fluqtuating as it was doing before One more important thing is when, cacher has done with its memory size and if you shm size is quite big, then better not to restart the apache so frequently. Cause with a apache restart it will clear its cache database and start caching back again. In my case, as i was using the compression level 9, it was creating extra pressure on the server while dumping the caches

I have to say, Xcache works very perfect for bulletin boards. I was using eaccelerator for around 4 weeks now, and the performance from eaccelerator was quite good. But as eaccelerator doesn’t work with suphp, i converted my php caching system to Xcache. Now i can see, Xcache works the best. It reducing a forum load with around 150 users online to 3.5% cpu While it was taking over 10% cpu a few hours ago. I have to say, xcache works perfect for forums. Though, i haven’t got enough profit for wordpress blogs by using xcache. I have seen a plugin for wordpress where it says, xcache cant prove the highest on general wordpress installations. Some caching objects needs to pass and wordpress needs to be made on a way so that it uses the xcache on its best. I m still testing this module and expecting a great result