I've been using eaccelerator to cache PHP opcode and improve my web server performance for a while. The main reason I didn't pick other solution back then was the ease of deployment; To make upgrade and maintenance easy, I usually only use Fedora pre-packaged software. Recently, I bumped into article on APC, and found it might be a better solution. Fortunately, Fedora now included it as standard. So, I decided to give it a try.

In order to benchmark the web server performance, I wrote a simple PHP script to poll a website with CURL. It might not be the most accurate, but all I need is a baseline to measure the average load time.

After some testing, here's result:
no acceleration: ~0.550 sec
eaccelerator 32Mb cache: ~0.475 sec
eaccelerator 64Mb cache: ~0.455 sec
APC 32Mb cache: ~0.417 sec
APC 64Mb cache: ~0.413 sec

APC is also come with a control panel:



From the performance point of view, any opcode cache helps server performance as expected. APC, from the result, has a edge over eaccelerator. In addition, APC has a more informative control panel. APC also a part of PECL, which is semi-standard to PHP.

Therefore, I switched to APC.

BTW, I also use my benchmark script on Google.... its load time is a wicked 0.112 sec. I guess I still have a long way to go.