I wan't quite sure where to post this, but the technical section seemed just as good a place as any.
I've seen that people have been having problems with server load and their servers being REALLY slow at times, and I was having the same problem even after tweaking my server's configuration files.
So I decided to put this guide/how-to together on how to install
Eaccelerator, a PHP caching application. If you're having trouble with server load or memory, give this a try--I'm almost certain that you'll get a speed boost and your server will be much happier with you.
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How-To: Installing Eaccelerator
What is It?
Eaccelerator is a PHP accelerator/encoder/caching utility that is based off of the old mmcache (which is no longer being maintained).
What Eaccelerator does is: it caches your PHP scripts so that the database is no longer being queried everytime someone needs a script. This is particularly useful for large forums, but pretty much anyone can benefit from it. Since these scripts are cached, you'll notice a decrease in memory use and server load.
Now, onto installing this!
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Installing Eaccelerator
1. First, you'll want to SSH into your server as the root user. you should be in the default directory now. If you're not, type in
cd ~
2. Now we'll make the eaccelerator directory:
mkdir /ea/
cd /ea/
2. Now we'll grab the files, and untar them:
Notice that it's a tar.bz2 file, so we need to decompress it twice.
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourc....4-rc1.tar.bz2
bzip2 -d eaccelerator-0.9.4-rc1.tar.bz2
tar xvzf eaccelerator-0.9.4-rc1.tar
3. Now that we've done that, let's install Eaccelerator:
Note: in the following "export" command, you need to point that to where PHP is installed. For most, it's usually either "usr/" or "usr/local", but it may be something else.
cd /eaccelerator-0.9.4-rc1/
export PHP_PREFIX="/usr"
$PHP_PREFIX/bin/phpize
./configure --enable-eaccelerator=shared --with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/bin/php-config
make
make install
4. It's basically installed, now we need to edit the php.ini files to include Eaccelerator. This is usually found in the /etc/ folder, but if you can't find it, run a "locate php.ini" (without quotes) to find it.
[i]I'm editting my file with nano, which pretty much anyone with a modern server should have. You can use pico or vi, it's your choice:
cd ~
nano /etc/php.ini
Now find ;Windows Extensions (press ctrl + W). Remove the mmcache lines (if you had it installed before) above this and...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a PHP extension install (most will probably want this)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a Zend extension install (only if you have Zend installed, or
if you're going to install it
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
zend_extension="/usr/lib/php4/eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"
5. Now we need to make the cache directory, where the cache files will be stored.
cd ~
mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator/
chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator/
6. Yay, it's installed! Let's restart Apache now so that Eaccelerator will start working:
service httpd restart
7. You *should* notice some sort of speed boost or that the server load/memory use has decreased. But let's just make sure that it's installed properly.
Open up your favorite FTP client and upload the eaccelerator.php and eaccelerator_password.php files to any directory on your website. I uploaded mine to my forum directory, but you can pretty much place them anywhere in the public_html directory.
Once that's done, you can go to
http://www.your-domain.com/path_to_s...ccelerator.php (of course, replacing that with the path to the script) to see if it's installed. If it's installed properly, you'll see a screen like this:
Otherwise, you'll see a screen saying that it's not installed. You have to go back through the instructions, retry it and see if that works. Check to make sure that you specified the right directories and files in the instructions above!
Now, we'll probably want to add a password to prevent some mean user from clearing the cached scripts or causing other bad stuff to happen. Navigate to the eaccelerator_password file and set an administrator name and password.
This doesn't set the password, but it gives you a line of code to place in your php.ini file (just below the eaccelerator part). Once you do this, you need to log in to view the eaccelerator page.
After you're done, you can delete or rename this file, but it's not required.
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Q&A
Q: Is it normal for the eaccelerator cache to be cleared when Apache restarts?
A: Yes, it's completely normal. When it restarts, all cache files will be removed, but as soon as those scripts are accessed, they are added to the cache.
Q: How do I upgrade?
A: If a new version comes out, just follow these instructions but replace the new file address URL with the new one. You can check the Eaccelerator page for available mirrors, just get the address of one and grab it with wget. Then replace the old filename used in the above instructions with the newer version's name. If possible, I'll try and keep it updated.
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So that's pretty much it. I wrote this to help those of you having trouble with high server load and memory use, and hopefully this will help.
Comments are welcome, this is my first semi-technical guide.
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