I've started a poll.. I'm curious about what percentage of web servers have Zend Optimizer installed.

If the script is encoded with Zend (Studio) then the server will need Zend Optimizer to run it.

Sometimes, I wonder why they don't include Zend Optimizer with the normal PHP source. The performance gains are totally worth it!

For those of you who don't know what Zend Optimizer is:

http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-optimizer.php

Has anyone, or does anyone, know of a comparison between Zend and PHPAccelerator?

Originally posted by beachtrader
Has anyone, or does anyone, know of a comparison between Zend and PHPAccelerator?

Why not ask this as a new thread instead of hijacking this one? :mad:

Thanks.

There was a comparison in LinuxFormat in the UK between the various PHP cache systems, on most tests, Zend and ionCube PHPA were neck and neck all the way, followed by Bware Afterburner and then APC.

Sorry Zippy. I just thought it was related, but I will post elsewhere.

Well PHPA does come with it's own optimiser as well, you don't just have to use it for caching purposes.

With regards to tools such as Zend Optimizer, you should be aware that typically scripts are likely to run slower.

This shouldn't be suprising, and although technically ZO is quite good, the costs of doing decent optimisations are typically not compensated for by the speed gains. Combining an optimizer with a code cache is the best scenario as the overhead of optimisation should then be a one off hit.

I voted.

I think an interesting poll in parallel with this one would be to ask exactly why certain extensions are installed on servers, e.g. ZO. Are users blindly installing it without knowing why? Did it come with the PHP distro and users don't know how to remove it? Are users worried about removing it? Is it because you measured performance and it *is* making a +ve difference? Are users running encoded files on all servers where it's installed etc.?

Only reason we run it and not the PHPA is because we have a couple of users who run commercial scripts encoded with the ZE, although we are trying to persuade the developers to offer a version encoded with the ionCube encoder.

PHPA certainly made a difference over ZO on the tests I did with a mildly complex script.

I have plesk 5 installed. doesn it auto install with it??

thanks

~Will