When you are installing ModernBill if you have both zend and ioncube installed how do you know which one to install mb with?

You use which ever you want. MB has two versions available for downloading one for zend and one for ioncube. Zend is smaller.

Most likely if your server has these features installed, it's ionCube. I'd try that one first.

Okay, any idea what the difference is other then size?

Zend uses less resource and runs faster IMO.

Hmm, ah I cannot decide!

Zend uses less resource and runs faster IMO.

Not necessarily. There is an indepedent report conducted by Olate at

http://www.olate.co.uk/development/benchmarks.php

As always, your mileage may vary as no two apps perform the same. Where there is additional overhead is with the runtime install method of ionCube, but this is unlikely to be noticable. Execution performance is the same whether a Loader is in the php.ini file or installed on the fly. If you have access to the php.ini file, you'll install there and the ionCube version is likely to be faster. If you use runtime install, it's probably because you don't have access to the php.ini file and staistically it's more than likely that you wouldn't be able to use the Zend version anyway, whereas the ionCube version may work out of the box thanks to the runtime install feature. You would then have your answer right there in that case :)

With regards to ZO on regular files, note that it tends to have no effect. Although there are some conflicting messages in the thread, this was noticed by Timdorr in post 28 and others here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=490696&page=2)

Hope that helps, and check the benchmarks :)

ionCube is nice since it comes with loaders so it can be installed whereever, whenever.

personally zend is better, and yes i do think its faster and zend does tkae up less space and is faster

Of course you're entitled to your opinion but our tests show that Zend is not faster at all, in fact the Optimizer slows down PHP execution. The filesize of encoded files is smaller however. But I don't see that as an advantage because most people are on decent connections now anyway.

I agree with Olate -- I prefer ioncube.

I actually bought both and ended up using IonCube. Zend had a flaw in which encoded pages could be decoded. There were sites you could drop code into and it would spit out your source code. At the time, Zend claimed to be working on a new version that would prevent this.

I also had trouble with the Zend optimizer working with code encoded with a previous version of Zend optimizer. Say a customer bought software that was encoded with Zend optimizer version x. Later, Zend releases optimizer version y and the customer installs that. All of a sudden the software doesn't work. Granted, this was with earlier versions of PHP (4.3).

There are a few versions of PHP that IonCube doesn't like, but overall it's been easier to develop with. IonCube has the ability to dynamically load itself instead of being in the php.ini file. But this uses the PHP dl() function, which has been deprecated in PHP 5 because of security risks. So this may not work in PHP 5 applications.

In sum, I'd recommend IonCube.