[phpa] Re: what is acceleration good for?

> 
> Hi, I surfed onto the php accelerator page, and it
> looked like exactly what I need. 
> 
> I have a lot of static content requiring  php includes
> and possibly a few online forms, so I suspect
> php-accelerator will be good for that. I'm still a
> relative newbie to php. 
> 
> I'm guessing that the application works by caching and
> that it works globally on all php pages.

It does, but it doesn't cache PHP output, but rather the compiled form of 
the source scripts. As my site says in the 'About' section, the reading and 
processing of source scripts can be quite time consuming, and PHPA 
eliminates that overhead. So yout scripts go faster, but remain as dynamic 
as without the cache.

> I'm thinking
> of installing a php based content management system
> like postnuke, and I was wondering whether
> php-accelerator interferes with that. Is accelerator
> good only for caching static content? Or  is it pretty
>safe to use regardless of which php application you
> plan to use/build? What kinds of php pages would you
> want to exclude explicitly in the php.in file? 

Barring any bugs or problems with your system, you should be able to 
install it and pretty much forget about it. Although many people have no 
problems with PHPA, some really heavy sites in particular have uncovered 
some outstanding issues, and there are a few fixes incorporated into the 
next release that's fairly imminent now. Generally you shouldn't need to 
exclude any files, unless you have ones that are changing very frequently, 
and where the overhead of recaching them (phpa always recaches files that 
it sees have changed) would reduce performance.  The main other thing is to 
be sure that you don't have an undersized cache. The default size is 8MB, 
but can be increased, or reduced. There is a tool for displaying how much 
of the SHM has been used, and you can also enable logging (enabled by 
default in 1.2p4) to see if phpa is ejecting scripts because it ran out of 
shm.

nick


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