High Performance PHP - Installing eAccelerator on FreeBSD

eAccelerator is a PHP caching system, which caches frequently used portions of PHP files to RAM to increase performance. This is especially great on high traffic websites such as forums. Performance gains of up to 1000% have been seen with eAccelerator. The following tutorial is how to install eAccelerator on FreeBSD using ports.

Using ports, compile and install:

cd /usr/ports/www/eaccelerator

make

make install

Make modifications to php.ini:

If you are using Zend:

vi /usr/local/Zend/etc/php.ini(this is the default location)

Add the following:

zend_extension="/usr/local/lib/php/20020429/eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="32"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"

Comment out the following lines:

zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-2.5.7
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-2.5.7

If you are not using Zend optimiser the add the following to your php.ini:

extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Create the caching directory:

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator

You can check if eAccelerator is working by copying the following file into your htdocs folder:

/usr/ports/www/eaccelerator/work/eaccelerator/eaccelerator.php