"Best" Accelerator tool - Memcached, APC, etc

[Leemy]

What are the differences, pros/cons to these different tools?
    *  APC
    * eAccelerator
    * Turck MMCache
    * Memcached
    * Zend Platform/Performance Suite (Not Zend Optimizer)

I am told APC is better than Memcached. I am trying to figure out which to set up with my SMF.

I have at peak 100 users online simultaneously every night, about 100-300 posts per day.

[Something like that]

Turk is old. eAccelerator is based off it.

eAccelerator and APC are accelerators. Memcached is only a cache.

I use APC personally and love it. APC is faster than memcached for the way SMF uses it. Memcached is the only one that works with multiple web servers (web farm).

Zend Platform costs money.

[Leemy]

I use APC personally and love it. APC is faster than memcached for the way SMF uses it.

Exactly what I needed. (I dont have multiple servers so memcached has no benefit) Thanks.

[青山 素子]

Zend Platform costs money.

SMF also does not support it directly and so it won't be able to manually take advantage of any caching support it has.

By the way, we use memcached on this site, although we are set up to have multiple front-end site servers, so we need the shared cache support it gives us.

[Leemy]

My managed VPS host is nice enough to install this for me. I asked them to set up APC rather than eAccelerator. Good call?

Once they install the APC package, is there any other steps in SMF? Just set to "Level 1 caching"?

[Something like that]

Yep, just set to Level 1 and be happy

[Leemy]

Installed eAccelerator and turns on level 1 on SMF   things feel fast but i have no way to quantitatively compare! Installed eAccelerator and turns on level 1 on SMF   things feel fast but i have no way to quantitatively compare before vs. after!

Do I have to set a specific bank of RAM from my 1028MB total or is that not necessary???

Thanks all, again!

[Something like that]

30 MB or so is more than sufficient unless you're running more PHP scripts than SMF.

[Leemy]

30MB is the default, is it not?

How can I check the current allotted memory? My host says they cant 'statically assign memory to any process'

[青山 素子]

Installed eAccelerator and turns on level 1 on SMF   things feel fast but i have no way to quantitatively compare!

Turn on page generation time display. It's labeled "Display time taken to create every page" and is under the layout section of features and options in the admin center. You should notice fewer database queries and shorter page creation time when caching is enabled.

[Leemy]

Yeah I've had it on.  I was hoping for a good statistic (mean load time, etc), rather than a snapshot. Anecdotally, seems faster.   Load times of 0.05 s to 0.40 s rather than before which i think was like 0.300 to 0.900 s.  (I simultaneously also changed the "separate folder" for user avatars which must also help)

Not really noticing fewer queries but whatever, what do I know lol

Thanks all for ur help

[Something like that]

Yep, you got a typical improvement

[Vekseid]

eAccelerator has issues with applications that take advantage of php 5.2 features, like protected items in classes and so on. This quite dramatically breaks Mediawiki : /  Otherwise, out of the APC/eAccelerator/xCache combo, it's the only one that properly works with mod_fcgid in Apache

[xCrucialDudex]

can anyone please explain how-to set up memcached to work with SMF? or perhaps it is SMF that needs some setup? either way I have memcahed installed and running on my server, it's listening on the loopback interface, standard port. I tell SMF to communicate with loopback interface (I tried also eth0 but to no avail) and it still says I have no accelerator. What could be wrong?

[青山 素子]

You also need the memcache PHP module.

[petesky]

I use EAC on W2K3 so will APC run on PHP 5.2.12 ?