With the first release of PHP 5.5 beta which includes the new Zend Opcache, I’d like to offer beta testers my free opcache control panel. It also works with PHP 5.4 and (in theory) 5.3
https://gist.github.com/ck-on/4959032/?ocp.php
or just right-click to download and save
Google and others have published several whitepapers showing benchmarks where tuning tcp/ip on servers can really help web browsing performance.
One of these important tweaks is known as IW10 which improves the tcp/ip congestion window by reducing ACKs (initally sending 10 packets instead of only 3) and is enabled by increasing initcwnd and initrwnd.
Unfortunately those on CentOS (one of the most popular linux production distributions) were not able to take advantage of this – until this weekend when CentOS 6.4 was shipped.
CentOS 6.3 could change initcwnd but NOT initrwnd (RWIN) which requires a kernel > 2.6.33
CentOS 6.4 is 2.6.32-358.0.1.el6 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3) so the feature has been backported
Google recently opensourced an interesting little project in C called ZOPFLI to try to get the most compression possible out of gzip which is one of the only universal compression available in browsers.
This is useful for things that are compressed once and served many times, for example jquery, stylesheets, etc. But in my testing, Zopfli only does very slightly better than 7zip’s ultra gzip compression set at mx9, and zopfli takes much much longer. It’s an interesting experiment but perhaps pointless.
If you want to try it, you can get it at:
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There is still another week of voting left before it becomes official on March 7th but the results are pretty much complete. PHP 5.5 will definitely integrate Zend Optimizer Plus opcache, built right into the distribution.
This is a good thing for the future of PHP but will require some changes for webhosts.
Since even PHP 5.4 is not widely adopted yet, we are talking 2015 for the masses.
But you don’t have to wait for PHP 5.5, you can replace APC, Xcache and eAccelerator immediately with Zend Optimizer Plus via the newly opensourced code and I’ve made a free control panel for it. Works fine on PHP 5.3 and 5.4 and you’ll typically see a minimum 10% performance boost on busy websites over those other opcode caches because of it’s extra optimization passes.
In celebration of Zend open-sourcing their Optimizer Plus opcache for PHP, I whipped up a quick’n'dirty control panel just now. There doesn’t seem to be any other one? I wanted to learn and review its behavior a little more closely, to compare it to APC, Xcache and eAccelerator opcode caches.
github: https://gist.github.com/ck-on/4959032
mirror: http://bbshowcase.org/plugins/ocp.zip
(update: Version 0.0.4 now adds file grouping / sorting )
Code is a bit nasty in this early version because I did it in an hour. There is only limited info available about the cache state and I am still learning some of its caveats like it doesn’t actually store the file cached time but the file’s physical timestamp (probably to just see if the file has changed so it can recache it).
screenshot:
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A new version of Nginx stable branch has appeared today with a rather long changelog:
http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.2
download: http://nginx.org/en/download.html
When building manually, remember to update pcre, currently at 8.32
ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/
Feb 13 update! Zend Optimizer+ is now officially open source so these instructions to manually install the binary are no longer needed! Go here instead: https://github.com/zend-dev/ZendOptimizerPlus/
I’ve also written a control panel for it which you can find here:
http://ckon.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/free-control-panel-for-zend-optimizer-plus/
With Zend supposedly open-sourcing their Optimizer+ opcode cache for PHP, likely replacing APC, I want to preview what I might be dealing with and any limitations/advantages.
However I did not want to install a bunch of unknown zend stuff into php slowing it down or causing conflicts, I only wanted the bare minimum and know exactly what I am installing.
Turns out it’s rather easy once you know what to look for.
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As PHP internals explores replacing the APC opcode cache with an open-sourced Zend Optimizer Plus an interesting benchmark was published. It shows WordPress serving nearly 10% more pages per second than APC while using Optimizer+ (both under PHP 5.5).
Following a series of memory leaks and other problems, the 3.1.14 beta release of the APC opcode cache for PHP has been recalled and removed from the pecl site by Rasmus as it’s not currently suitable for use.
I noticed the memory problem a week or two ago. I’ve carefully tested each revision in the trunk after the 3.1.13 release and have found revision 328264 to be the last good update if you want some of the subtle bug fixes since 3.1.13 without the later problems.
You can fetch a specific revision via svn like so:
svn co -r 328264 http://svn.php.net/repository/pecl/apc/trunk/
This was the changelog for 3.1.14 which has been since removed: Read the rest of this page »
There has been a growing discussion about this in PHP internals but now there is a semi-official wiki page explaining what is going to happen with the replacement of APC by Zend open-sourcing their OptimizerPlus opcode cache.
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus
Right now it’s only a “proposal” but if you look at the internals discussion, it’s almost certainly going to happen, it’s just a matter of “when” not “if”.
Given that the few people working on APC would mostly likely stop and focus instead on Optimizer+, APC is now in theory, doomed. Which is a bit crazy considering how much code is out there to take advantage of it’s user cache (which is significantly faster than say memcached on a local single server). OptimizerPlus has no user-cache shared memory support at all, it’s only an opcode cache.
Not sure why the benchmark uses “ancient” WordPress 2.1.1 but in theory this would give even the newest WordPress 3.5 a five to ten percent performance boost.
MariaDB is a true open-source, drop-in binary replacement for MySQL – that is until the next version of MySQL 5.6 – MariaDB is going to go its own way for its version 10 jump after 5.5
So if you were hoping for innodb fulltext search in MariaDB 10, it’s not going to happen, but maybe in 10.1
PHP 5.5.0 will reach a feature freeze is on February 7th, 2013, just two weeks away, for it’s first beta release.
There was some discussion of including the APC opcode cache into 5.5 but this will decidedly NOT happen because it would delay release by several months.
However in an interesting twist, there is now discussion of open-sourcing ZEND OPTIMIZER PLUS and including with PHP 5.5 instead.
Zend Optimizer+ is a commercial opcode cache for PHP and is slightly faster than APC but currently used on only a small percentage of servers compared to APC.
This essentially would doom APC, despite the suggestion it would remain available as there are only a few contributors to APC at this time and then would obviously switch to the zend optimizer+ sooner or later.
Remember, PHP 5.3 will reach end-of-life in March with the release of PHP 5.5.0
