How to install the APC PHP Cache on Debian (Lenny)

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How to install the APC PHP Cache on Debian (Lenny)

11/29/09

How to install the APC PHP Cache on Debian (Lenny)

01:50:50 am, by Francois Planque

, Categories: PHP, Linux stuff

The APC PHP Cache Control Panel

The APC cache can significantly improve your PHP script performance, just by installing it, which basically takes 5 minutes! (Plus, it’s actually supported by the core PHP developers and will probably be integrated into PHP6…)

Here’s what I did on my Debian Lenny box…

First you may want to have a reference benchmark to see if it actually improves:

Code:

ab -c5 -n100 http://www.yoursite.com/yourscript.php

Now install the APC package:

Code:

aptitude install php-apc

Now, restart apache:

Code:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now, you can run your benchmark again and see the difference! Tada! :)

Follow up:

APC comes with a control panel script, that allows you to check cache usage. Here’s how to make it available on your web root (for example):

Code:

gunzip /usr/share/doc/php-apc/apc.php.gz
ln -s /usr/share/doc/php-apc/apc.php /var/www/apc.php

Note that you should also have the php-gd package installed in order to get nice charts! ;)

2 comments

Comment from: Walter Cruz [Visitor]

Good. I was using xcache, but switched to apc. But by setup is not that simple ;) I'm in a linode VPS with 360 MB of RAM, and with that setup, is better to use php as fastcgi to get eeverything under control.. A post that explains almost everything about it: http://www.brandonturner.net/blog/2009/07/fastcgi_with_php_opcode_cache/