I have got a dedicated server (PIII 733, 384 Mb) for a fairly busy site with 3 million pageviews (PHP/MySQL) per month.

Most of the time the load is fine (<0.5) but at times the server gets abnormous peaks of 100-200 hits per second for just a few seconds. I believe this is because the IDE-harddisk can't handle the load at times which is why database requests are piling up.

I am considering buying the Zend Cache. This software caches php-scripts and include-files into memory where the standard (free) edition of PHP retrieves the scripts from disk for each request. This Cache should speed processing with about 300 percent.

As anybody got experience with the Zend Cache?

I manage the server for a website that is receiving 21 million pageviews (PHP/MySQL) per month. We have also found, that plain PHP just doesn't cut it.

I have had very good results with APC (Alternative PHP Cache) -- it is free (as opposed to the 1500$ the Zend Cache costs). We experienced a 700% performance increase.

I would use the SHM version, and grab a copy of the CVS version instead of the older version on the homepage. We do not use the "mtime" setting, as that gives just an extra notch of performance (it does however also mean, that we have to clear the cache every time we change a PHP file).

--
Jens Kristian Søgaard, Mermaid Consulting I/S,
jens@mermaidconsulting.dk,
http://www.mermaidconsulting.com/

I saw some reports of tests somewhere that reported Zend Cache (the $1500 version) reported 1500% increases in PHP performance after a default installation... If you could afford it then it could be worth it. That said I've seen APC in action and it is a very good alternative. Definitely worth checking out.

Thanks, I will check both alternatives out.

By all means I could never afford the hardware which would give a performance increase of 700% let alone 1500%.