PHP Accelerator is awesome

I have a server with PHPAdsNew installed serving around 20 requests per second serving a really busy web site.

Few days ago the admins for that website doubled the number of ads per page, and the server stopped responding most of the day 🙁

I installed PHP Accelerator to make it faster to serve the those ads, but it didn’t help that much, I tried every trick I know to maximize MySQL performance (although it didn’t have any load in the first place) nothing worked.

Today, I sat down and played a little with PHP Accelerator, I moved the cache directory from /tmp (mounted on swap) to a regular directory, and the amazing thing happened, the CPU utilization drop from 100% to 50%.

Then I tried the command “phpa_cache_admin -mv” to realize that PHP Accelerator is working without shared memory enabled, I enabled it and restarted Apache, the utilization drop to only 10% 🙂

I did all of these changes after the peak hour, I wonder how it will perform tomorrow in the peak hour, I’ll post my results tomorrow.

UPDATE: Peak hour update, very smooth as if there aren’t any requests, CPU utilization 40% 🙂