List of PHP accelerators

Alternative PHP Cache

Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free, open source framework that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory. APC is quickly becoming the de-facto standard PHP caching mechanism as it will be included built-in to the core of PHP starting with PHP 6.

eAccelerator

eAccelerator was born in December 2004 as a fork of the Turck MMCache project. Turck MMCache was created by Dmitry Stogov and much of the eAccelerator code is still based on his work. eAccelerator also contained a PHP encoder and loader, but the development staff discontinued the encoder and removed this feature after December 2006.

  • Home Page: http://eaccelerator.net/
  • PHP version: Supports PHP 4 and all PHP 5 thread-safe releases including 5.3 from version 0.9.6. In older releases, the encoder will only work with PHP versions from the 4.x.x branch. eAccelerator will not work with any other versions of PHP. eAccelerator can only be used with the thread-safe version of PHP.
  • Latest stable version: 0.9.6 (2010-02-04)
  • Status: Actively maintained
  • Download link: (look for latest versions) http://eaccelerator.net/
  • Official installation help: http://eaccelerator.net/wiki/InstallFromSource

ionCube PHP Accelerator

Launched in 2001, ionCube PHP Accelerator (PHPA) was the first freely available PHP performance solution to match the performance of the commercial Zend Cache product and maximize the performance potential of PHP. Created before ionCube Ltd. was founded and at a time when the performance of PHP was regarded as lackluster when compared to other popular web programming languages, PHPA made accelerated PHP available to almost everyone and showed that PHP need not be the laggard in the performance stakes. In response to early concerns raised by Zeev Suraski of Zend Technologies about the effect that an open source rival might have on their commercial alternative, the author of PHPA chose to keep the project closed source. Although closed source, the availability of PHPA on a wide variety of platforms led to its extensive adoption world wide from small sites to Yahoo!. It also inspired the redevelopment of APC to use the shared memory execution techniques that PHPA and Zend Cache had adopted instead of deserialization on each request that incurred performance penalties. Other accelerators such as mmcache subsequently appeared in later years. PHPA is now discontinued and the development of a more advanced replacement has been announced.

Only supports PHP 4. No new versions on the download page since Jan. 2003.

Turck MMCache

Turck MMCache is now discontinued, although it is still widely used. eAccelerator is a fork of Turck MMCache.

XCache

XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load. It is tested on linux and supported under Windows, for thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions of PHP. This relatively new opcode caching software has been developed by mOo, one of developers of Lighttpd, to overcome some of the limitations of the existing solutions at that time; such as being able to use it with new PHP versions as they arrive.

Nusphere PhpExpress

PhpExpress is NuSphere’s free PHP accelerator that speeds up the execution of regular PHP files and provides support for loading of PHP files encoded with NuSphere’s PHP encoder Nu-Coder. PhpExpress loads both encoded and not encoded PHP files directly into the PHP engine, saving time and boosting performance of the PHP interpreter. PhpExpress also caches the files and thus provides a speed boost even for non-encoded files. It’s available on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS, and Sun Solaris.

Zend Optimizer+

Zend Optimizer+ is a component of Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition. Zend Optimizer+ speeds up PHP execution by opcode caching and optimization. It stores precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. This eliminates the stages of reading code from the disk and compiling it on future access. For further performance improvements, the stored bytecode is optimized for faster execution.

Zend Platform

Zend Platform (formerly Zend Cache and then Zend Accelerator) is a commercial Web Application Server product. It has a complete set of performance capabilities that includes more than a simple PHP accelerator. Features include code caching/acceleration, data caching, content (html output) caching, download optimization and off-line (asynchronous) processing capabilities that can result in significant performance improvements for most PHP applications. It also includes detailed PHP monitoring and root cause analysis support to help in tuning and debugging, session fail-over support for HA (High Availability) needs and other integration capabilities including Java integration.

Zend platform and zend core are now in ‘end of life’ status (http://www.zend.com/en/products/platform/end-of-life) and are replaced with Zend Server http://www.zend.com/products/server.

Windows Cache Extension for PHP

A free, open source (New BSD License), PHP-accelerator developed by Microsoft for PHP under Windows. The extension includes PHP opcode cache, file cache, resolve file path cache, object/session cache, file change notifications and luck/unlock API’s. Combination of all these caches results in significant performance improvements for PHP applications hosted on Windows. The extension is primarily used with Internet Information Services and non-thread-safe build of PHP via FastCGI protocol.

Other software

Zend Optimizer

Despite the name, Zend Optimizer is not a code accelerator. Rather, is a free, closed source PHP extension by Zend that enables PHP to run files encoded by Zend Guard .

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