PHP opcode caching and SMP (multiple processors)

Hello all,

Off-Topic Note

I’ve decided to start blogging on a bit more of a regular basis. I’m not much of a blogger, but who knows … it might just stick this time. I have a hunch problem was subject matter. So from now on I plan to stick to what I know best. Geek stuff!

Main Feature

Just learned an interesting thing about APC (the popular PHP opcode cache) today: APC hates SMP. I’ve been trying for nearly a month to get APC to run stably on our multi-CPU system. Invariably the extension will start seg. faulting within a few minutes or hours of starting up.

After many headaches, I gave up on APC. Running PHP without an opcode cache is a fairly crazy thing to do, so for the last month I’ve been looking high and low for a replacement. Recently I just stumbled across XCache and immediately loved what I saw. XCache is very similar to APC, the installation was nearly identical, but it has a few added options (I haven’t explored them all yet).

Best of all, it works great with SMP!!!

XCache Introcution Page ... before then I had used APC. Although it was quite stable for a php4 with flock() configuration it had become unstable once I upgraded my server to a dual cpu (4 threaded cpu) because it flock()ed badly so XCache was used instead and seems to have solved the problem.

I couldn’t have said it better my self.

James.