HYPERAXE

Since it’s summer time again, bulking phase is over and it’s time to get ripped again.

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After moving onto a VPS with just an ample amount of resources, I faced the challenge of optimizing all my hosted services as well as the scripts and any programs I run on my own little server.

First in line of course are the personal web sites I host such as this blog. I noticed that even though I am using a broadband connection, the time for a page to be rendered (according to the last line on the Wordpress page) took 3 seconds on average. I decided not to go into the web page optimization first and see if the available PHP script optimizers can make things a bit faster for my pages. At least if they did, it would save me a lot of time on PHP programming.

I tried 2 popular PHP optimizers, namely Zend Optimizer and Eaccelerator. Well here are the results or let’s say my experience with them.

ZEND OPTIMIZER

My VPS provider have a list of free software that they can install free of charge and I was glad to see that Zend Optimizer was included on the list. So I emailed their technical support and in after a few hours, Zend Optimizer was installed on my VPS. But then again, problems occurred since there were some conflicts with the libraries used so I asked them to uninstall it again. I then just tried to install Zend Optimizer from source so I would have better control of the installation and so that I can easily troubleshoot any problems that may arise. Well, I’m glad things worked out perfectly and I had Zend Optimizer running in no time.

After setting up Zend Optimizer to work with the Apache PHP module, I did a couple of test on my web sites to see if things would improve in terms of rendering time and sad to say I was only saved 1 second of rendering time since the average is still at 2 seconds, and sometimes still hitting the 3 seconds mark. Well, back to the drawing board I guess.

EACCELERATOR

I then turned to eAccelerator, and after installing it as part of my PHP module, I did proceeded with my web sites time trial. Guess what, it really made a difference since my page rendering time now just averages 0.5 second. That was fast!

ZEND OPTIMER WITH EACCELERATOR

This is one setup I wouldn’t recommend since it wouldn’t really make any difference. I tried setting up both Zend Optimizer and eAccelerator and the page rendering time averages to 2 seconds.

Conclusion:

So for those who wants to make their PHP based web site run faster, I recommend using eAccelerator. It really rocks!