Everything You Need to Know About OpCode Caches

Last year I wrote a talk called “Fast, Not Furious: How to Find and Fix Slow Code” — a performance talk covering profiling, memcache and some other stuff.

As I often do — to hedge my bets — I stuck a few slides on the end “just in case” I ran through everything too quickly and needed to fill in time.

These slides were on APC, the Alternative PHP Cache, and went just a little into tokens and how APC works under the hood.

I really enjoyed presenting those 6 slides, and I’ve been wanting to expand on that topic ever since then.

Well, after a few weeks of hard work, some input from some great people, including Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Smith and Julien Pauli, I’m so very happy to publish PHP Performance I: Everything You Need to Know About OpCode Caches.

This is a 17 page document (in it’s original format), also available (in somewhat abridged form) as a 20 minute screencast (Transcript/Slides)

Alongside this, we are also releasing the Engine Yard PHP Performance Tools. This is the start of a suite of tools to aid with improving PHP performance.

As you can probably guess, this is part 1 in a series; the next in the series will be published in late October.

The video is embedded below (though I highly recommend reading the full length document also) :