PHP Accelerators

PHP Accelerators/Cachers will boost the performance of your PHP applications, by caching the compiled form of php scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling the code every time the page is loaded. A PHP accelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times. Normally you will install these in …

Why APC sucks (and should be pulled from PECL)

APC (Alternative PHP Caching http://us.php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php) is a memory based opcode caching system which supports variable caching inside of php scripts.  It’s among 3 major opcode cachers for PHP (the other two are XCache and EAccelerator).  While APC sounds great (after all, to install it all you need to type is `pecl install apc`), it suffers from a …

PHP heredoc syntax

In order to allow people to easily write large amounts of text from within PHP, but without the need to constantly escape things, heredoc syntax was developed. Heredoc might be a little tricky to understand at first, but it’s actually a big help. Put simply, it allows you to define your own string limiter so …